Blocking is good option to improve individual experience, but a flood of low effort, spammy content from bots makes a very bad first impression on newcomers.
To be fair, it's both. There is no discussion without content, so having some content helps to kickstart discussion. But excessive botspam just makes it look even emptier.
If anything is going to kill lemmy it will be these low effort content bots. Just post after post of either reddit reposts no one is replying to or random news links no one is replying to. When I scroll lemmy at night before bed 90% of the content is garbage with no comments posted to it.
It makes me want to go back to reddit in spite of it all.
We're trying to build communities. A good way to do it is to have bots post content, so there's stuff to see on our feeds.
It's always a balancing act that doesn't work for everybody. But the beauty here is that each individual can curate their own feed.
Edit: I misspoke, I'm not someone who actively uses of promotes bot use. I just remember people talking about this discussion previously and this was a justification used. OP asked a question, I provided an answer. It's not MY answer, but it's still one. Don't shoot the messenger.
That's entirely understandable. That's the thing, though. It's hard to have a community grow on its own, organically, in these times. A large majority of users are rather passive, they don't actively contribute by posting or commenting so much. If they don't get enough content on a topic/community, they'll forget it exists.
So, to build a community, you get a bot to "seed" it with content until enough people know it exists and contribute stuff themselves.
It's weird and fucked and, unfortunately, it's the world we live in now.
We’re trying to build communities. A good way to do it is to have bots post content, so there’s stuff to see on our feeds.
There's always ups and downs with everything. By using bots you might get subscribers, but people like me who don't agree with being force fed robot spam will actively avoid such subs.
In fact I find it so disagreeable I refuse to donate resources so people can host spam on my instance instead of actually posting content themselves.
I would not like to be part of a community that finds auto-generated content to be of an acceptable quality.
I think the effect here is more good than bad. Nobody wants to post to a community that's just bot spam. You're trying to skip the small community phase in favor of faking being a previous community with bots, but that phase is essential for community development and cohesion.
Lemmit is a scourge. They claim to be trying to "bootstrap" Lemmy by providing content but so much of it is questions with no responses (on Lemmy) or Imgur links to deleted images.
Day or two a go while browsing feed set to sort all and new, i saw there was a bot posting same news article three different communities, all different instances, and a another bot posting the same exact news article fourth time on the same community that allready posted.
I dont think it is necessary from bot to post same content on multiple communities.