Sweet jeebers, I hope this is comedy. I laughed, but 99+% of the bots roaming Reddit are nothing but a drag, and I hope there's a way to block all bots here.
I would say that some bots were useful. Like the one that would convert the units from "freedom" oned to ones that actually make sense (or the other way around).
What really pisses me off are entire comment threads filled with "happy cake day!". Like that adds anything to the conversation. There's 1/365 chance that any comment is made on their anniversary. It's not that rare when there's hundreds of millions of people posting (or whatever smaller percentage actually post)
That bothered me less than whenever some thread got successful and a mod decided that their input deserved to be viewed as the top comment, so they pinned it to the thread. 95% of the time those comments had nothing to do with reddit moderation, just a normal comment that wouldn't have even been upvoted if it hadn't been made in sudo mode.
I am also glad to no longer see those stupid reply memes that everyone felt compelled to use. "This" or "This is the way". It gave me second-hand embarrassment. It seemed like no one could think to reply for themselves anymore.
I'm potentially in the minority here, but what drove me up the wall were threads on a very interesting original post, whose comments were just endless chains of puns and lazy jokes, rather than any actual discussion.
A few are, but I think most aren't. It would be easy bot bait, but at the same time, it's also fairly context-sensitive in a way that would let a fair few users pick up on someone being a bot or not.
Although that doesn't mean that you can't have bots that are in on the joke.
Semi-related, Wikipedia discussion pages used to be left blank, with a red link, unless there was actually discussion there. Now every article has a boilerplate article quality scale rating template, a notice about when to use or not use the discussion page, etc. pasted onto the talk page as soon as it's created. I miss seeing a rare blue talk page link and going "I wonder what weird stuff people are saying in the talk page for Alex Kidd in Shinobi World."
We'll almost certainly have the same once someone develops an Automoderator-bot.
Although it might be unavoidable. Some of them were handy for letting the users help keep a sub on-topic, by letting them vote spam posts to be removed before the moderators had time to get around to deal with reports, or saw those posts for themselves.
Others, like Locationbot on /r/legaladvice might be to keep an archive of the post, so that users can read and comment on it, even after the original has been removed, but without them having to go and leave a link elsewhere.
Both of those would be pretty handy for Lemmy as well as Reddit, and I would not be surprised if someone ended up making more of the same, sooner or later.
Something that might be nice, is if Lemmy had a way for users to silently summon bots to a thread, so you didn't have a bunch of threads that were just users summoning DownloaderBot, or setting a reminder for themselves.
We’ll almost certainly have the same once someone develops an Automoderator-bot.
But unlike reddit, lemmy is FOSS and as such people could implement a feature to not count comments made by accounts marked as bots. So only comments (supposedly) made by humans count towards the comment count.
I didn't necessarily mind the automod comments, but I did hate the fact that there was no way to disable them for subscribers of a sub. It got very obnoxious very quickly.
I ended up unsubscribing from one of the Mod Support subs because every single thread was like this. There were at least four or five automod comments on every post. It was so fucking obnoxious.
r/NeutralNews and r/NeutralPolitics were both bad for that. They had two auto-posts and, since I am slow, I clicked on them every time to the comments just to see the boilerplate auto-posts.