The only way that I think scraping bots are helpful would be for purely archivale purposes. I wish someone would create an Instance that scrapes old Reddit posts and information and posts that information solely on that instance. Scraping new content and posting it here to Lemmy is not even using Lemmy, we've just gone back to Reddit at that point.
There’s a PCMR one I don’t mind because it just results in images of peoples builds in my feed. Another bot I appreciate is a HN bot over on derp.foo - mildly useful to have this stuff collected over here like it’s an RSS feed.
Lemmy should not try to be a carbon copy of a 20 year-old VC-funded for-profit site with hundreds of millions of users. Lemmy should establish its own identity and play to its strengths.
I find them useless because you often lose the necessary title and post text that accompanied the image, plus you always lose the relevant discussion. This last bit is almost always the most engaging part of the post.
I suppose they could be useful in adult communities, or for memes and shitposting where titles and text are either redundant or useless.
It depends on the bot. That one on lemmit online is as dumb as rocks. The Boycott Reddit Bot is doing a decent-enough job of generating posts that people reply to.
I was following a few just to keep up with what cool things people were making. I think I unfollowed them now because reddit posts more often than lemmy and these dominated my feed and I still had no one to talk to about the post.
Semi related: I almost wish we were archiving Reddit posts with Lemmy, so we could find our answers here. Like this? the people in the comments haven't found all of the resume settings, I think. They're kind of spread out. I'd suggest to keep looking. I just accomplished this task, but I'm not logging into that website. Need an /c/AnswerstoRedditQuestions@multiple.domains lol. Directly bring value to redditors in interacting with lemmy. Hey bro we answered your question here take a look ->
Only thing that leaves me worrying is longevity of hosting service. I used that thing for twelve years. This whole time the servers haven't lost track of my data. How long will these servers last?