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).
"Remindme" type bots are a band aid fix. Can you imagine if instead, the app/website/service provided that ? I shouldn't have to see what you save now should I.
For the second point, mostly because nobody made an app that combined the two well and/or was popular. The "simple calendar" app let's you create events AND tasks. I honestly don't even get what you're trying to get at with your second point.
Honestly I think that's just a failing of community ethos. It'd be nice to bring back the expectation that people make the bare minimum attempt to check the rules of a community they're trying to participate in, and let moderators just assume that everyone has read the sidebar rules. If you haven't, and you break a rule by accident... well, tough luck, you'll get the same treatment as everyone else. Next time, read before posting.
The thing about automod comments is that they were, indeed, comments. As such, they showed up in your replies.
So if you made a post, you'd get that message in a place you would expect to see content that you would actually want to engage with, that is, people discussing your post.
Brave for your to assume that people read the automod comments. I quickly learned to igbore it, it was a second nature for me to scroll past it.
Than again, I never had any serious troubles with my posts or comments being moderated. Perhaps I was just not being a jerk which seems to get you very far (not already if course as some Reddits were nazis about their silly rules).
Every time I would post something on Reddit and get all excited like someone has replied! Someone out there liked this! ... Nope. Automoderator just replying with the rules again.
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 themselevs.
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.
Maybe someone will find a way to mod or extend an instance in some way which removes the necessity to add a comment. Like a "pre comment alert" plugin. If Lemmy had some form of extensions api it would certainly be possible
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.
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 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.
The crux of the problem with Reddit is they drag their feet on these features. Mods have been asking for mod tools for decades. So they had to come up with these half-baked measures.
The beauty of open-source and federation: need a change just make it yourself!
This is pretty much the main reason I am excited for Lemmy and the fediverse. No monetization interests and gatekeeping to get in the way of building the software the way the community needs it. This is why it's so important that the user be the customer.
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