I sort by all and new and have seen a fair amount of posts from bots bringing over content from Reddit. A lot of it doesn’t have much if any engagement on here and as far as I can tell even if there was it wouldn’t cross back and forth between the two platforms.
The communities these bots are posting to seem to have a low amount of subscribers and with the flood of content it seems a bit like a ghost town. Almost like subscribing to the RSS feed of a subreddit.
I’m not up in arms about it. The posts are being made by only a couple of bots into subreddit specific communities (ex. AskReddit) and Lemmy gives you the ability to block communities so this isn’t really showing up in my feed anymore.
The only possible issue I could see in the future is if Lemmy communities tried to link with a subreddit’s. For example an instance’s pc gaming community with /r/PCGaming.
I’m curious to hear how you feel about Reddit content automatically (or even manually) being posted here.
My issue with bot posts is that they lack the authenticity that comes with an actual user’s posts. Isn’t it really nice when an OP sometimes responds to your comments, especially on subs like r/askreddit?
I don’t think we should worry about “user engagement” and growth so much. These are just metrics that companies use to increase profit and get advertisers. People here have already pointed out that they feel more engaged on Lemmy because their submissions feel more valued in this smaller community—they don’t get lost amongst a thousand other comments like on reddit.
I think the focus should be on creating a space where people can have genuine conversations, even if only a few people are involved.