So I purposed that for Lemmy and mastdon a bot that post links to YouTube videos and news articles relevant the city I live in, and I got push back on suggesting the idea. I suggesting this bot because my city isn't big enough to pump out content everyday and the links would seed content for a Lemmy community so that its not empty.

I have looked into city subReddit and for my city links to news stories are basically non existent and big city like NYC news article links are rare, but do get engagement.

I have been told that link bots don't help with empty communities and something about redundancy.

I do look at politics community and that's nothing but links.

I'm asking for general perspective from both sides

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[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 3 points 23 hours ago

I think it's fine as long as:

Your bot is clearly marked as such
It only post to communities where it has explicitly been made welcome, either after you talking to the admins or in a community you run

A lot of people, myself included, are hesitant to take the time to look at content if nobody took the time to manually share it. But for a use-case like you mentioned, for a local community that is too small to be established naturally any time soon, I think it could make sense. Especially for local news — YouTube videos should maybe still go through a human screening before being shared.

That's my five cents, anyway. :)