I'm potentially in the minority here, but what drove me up the wall were threads on a very interesting original post, whose comments were just endless chains of puns and lazy jokes, rather than any actual discussion.

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To be fair, if fediverse ever takes off, they'll probably need those automods to prevent things from getting out of control.

The potential loss of automods was also one of the things people were worried about with the API changes.

We'll almost certainly have the same once someone develops an Automoderator-bot.

Although it might be unavoidable. Some of them were handy for letting the users help keep a sub on-topic, by letting them vote spam posts to be removed before the moderators had time to get around to deal with reports, or saw those posts for themselves.

Others, like Locationbot on /r/legaladvice might be to keep an archive of the post, so that users can read and comment on it, even after the original has been removed, but without them having to go and leave a link elsewhere.

Both of those would be pretty handy for Lemmy as well as Reddit, and I would not be surprised if someone ended up making more of the same, sooner or later.

Something that might be nice, is if Lemmy had a way for users to silently summon bots to a thread, so you didn't have a bunch of threads that were just users summoning DownloaderBot, or setting a reminder for themselves.

Semi-related, Wikipedia discussion pages used to be left blank, with a red link, unless there was actually discussion there. Now every article has a boilerplate article quality scale rating template, a notice about when to use or not use the discussion page, etc. pasted onto the talk page as soon as it's created. I miss seeing a rare blue talk page link and going "I wonder what weird stuff people are saying in the talk page for Alex Kidd in Shinobi World."

What really pisses me off are entire comment threads filled with "happy cake day!". Like that adds anything to the conversation. There's 1/365 chance that any comment is made on their anniversary. It's not that rare when there's hundreds of millions of people posting (or whatever smaller percentage actually post)

We need an instance where every community is full of self-perpetuated botspam. Then every other instance can defederate from it.

r/NeutralNews and r/NeutralPolitics were both bad for that. They had two auto-posts and, since I am slow, I clicked on them every time to the comments just to see the boilerplate auto-posts.

Beep. Boop. Meow.

There's pretty much nothing stopping anyone from doing that here, though.

I ended up unsubscribing from one of the Mod Support subs because every single thread was like this. There were at least four or five automod comments on every post. It was so fucking obnoxious.