TLDR Bots can be good, bots can also be bad. We need to find a balance.

I feel the value of Reddit, Lemmy, and any similar platform does not come from the post itself but (a) the interactions within the comments and (b) the sorting based on votes.

These two features make information here reliable and obtaining reliable information becomes more productive.

For example, an article expresses information verified by a single person or a team, but when that article is posted here many people read it and share their opinion. I can go through the comments and determine how bullshit or not that article is. Also, the comments contain quotes, summaries and relevant information which one would have to spend hours researching. Lastly, when multiple articles are posted on a community sorting allows me to find the articles worth my time.

It does not matter if the post was created by a bot, but whether humans interacted with it.

With all that, I would like to agree with some people here that bots can be a threat. If the content they produce overwhelms the humans interacting with the content.

If human content is buried under thousands of bot posts, noone will interact with it. We need lemmings to feel they are valued by their communities, they shouldn’t have to compete with emotionless robots.