So as some of you may have noticed, the last 5 or so xkcd's posted have been by me. I wrote up a little autoposting script at some ungodly hour and set it up in a cron to post new comics. I am not doing this for the karma, since anyone looking at my submission history (which I assume YC would do) would notice the source of whatever karma I get. I post because I figured someone would post the xkcd at some point anyway, and I may as well save people the time.
The issue is, I've seem enough negative reactions to warrant concern. While nothing is preventing me from posting the latest comic manually each day, and considering xkcd's low volume I feel it's not a problem, I have no desire to piss anyone off. I'm also curious about how the community feels about this practice. So tell me HN: is such a practice (in the volume of 3 submissions a week) offensive? If there are a significant number of upvotes on comments against me, I will stop this practice, but I feel that tasteful bots, when used in moderation, would make things easier and more efficient on HN, though I can definitely see a potential issue with it snowballing (i.e. posting every TechCrunch entry as someone previously suggested).
Also, how do people feel about the idea of having something like an xkcd bot account, that way no one in particular benefits from the karma gain? While I recognize that most of us have xkcd in our readers, there are some who only want to view the interesting ones, which is what upvoting is meant to do anyway.
If anyone has been bothered by my use of an autoposter I apologize, I never meant to offend :).
I think users should only submit things they personally think are awesome and would interest other people.
Autoposting scripts remove the human element of "sharing links" which is what this site was built on.