Novelty accounts can be a useful and unintended feature of a good community based website. I think it's important for us to remember the values of the site and determine on a case by case basis whether the specific novelty account or bot adds value that contributes positively to the culture of the site.
Where most of my community site experience comes from is reddit and there are a number of novelty accounts and bots that added a lot of value to the community. Poemforyour_sprog is great. So is the SR-71 facts bot because it only posted the same damn story, but it was a story that everyone was always curious about. Someone always was hearing it for the first time even though it's job was to literally just repost. Another one was a user who posted relevant episode information when someone posted youtube clips of a show or posted a quote. All good uses of novelty accounts. I once considered creating a bot that commented whenever someone said something critical of the US, just as a satirical post, along the lines of "you're now moderator of /r/pyongyang", but decided against it because I know how annoying that would be.
If your bot is insulting, it should be down voted. If it is essentially encouraging vote brigading, down votes. It's up to us to decide and that's it. The same way we decide the merit of individual Snaps and comments.
Novelty accounts can be a useful and unintended feature of a good community based website. I think it's important for us to remember the values of the site and determine on a case by case basis whether the specific novelty account or bot adds value that contributes positively to the culture of the site.
Where most of my community site experience comes from is reddit and there are a number of novelty accounts and bots that added a lot of value to the community. Poemforyour_sprog is great. So is the SR-71 facts bot because it only posted the same damn story, but it was a story that everyone was always curious about. Someone always was hearing it for the first time even though it's job was to literally just repost. Another one was a user who posted relevant episode information when someone posted youtube clips of a show or posted a quote. All good uses of novelty accounts. I once considered creating a bot that commented whenever someone said something critical of the US, just as a satirical post, along the lines of "you're now moderator of /r/pyongyang", but decided against it because I know how annoying that would be.
If your bot is insulting, it should be down voted. If it is essentially encouraging vote brigading, down votes. It's up to us to decide and that's it. The same way we decide the merit of individual Snaps and comments.