Why are there so many bots all lemmy?

Because people think “content” is what makes this kind of site great. In reality it’s discussion.

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.
- Yes you need content, but without the discussion the content is just a firehose of random garbage.
Ofc! It’s what made the platform i Refuse Entusiastically During Dis Intervention To Discuss so great!
Luckily there are a lot more users than there were a couple of weeks ago.

Blocking the bots has really gone a long way to make my Lemmy experience more enjoyable.

Is it a matter of simply blocking the users that are bots?
- Yeah that's what I've been doing
- 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.
- Theres an option in your profile settings to hide bot accounts
- I just blocked the ones doing the reddit archiving. If a bot is annoying you just block it!
Is it a matter of simply blocking the users that are bots?

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.

ee is trying to fix that, we had a thread about bot infestations. We put rules in place for bot overrunning of feeds

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.

I honestly wish the major instances would ban repost bots. We don't need to literally copy Reddit to Lemmy. It's just polluting it.
- I don’t see the point in most. Like memes and news maybe but so many posts are meant to drive discussion or is a question

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.

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.

It rubs me the wrong way tbh, because it doesn’t feel authentic at all
- +1 I Have blocked a good number of these.
- 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.
- I agree with you. I'm not actively promoting bot use, just explaining the thought process of those that use them.