I've disallowed viewing bot accounts since day one, mostly to avoid inane joke response bots as they were so prevalent on reddit.

I did the same thing for the same reason, and was my initial reasoning for not marking L4s. When I read "bots" my initial thought was the useless pun bots, or autocorrect bots, etc.

My plan to make mine different was if someone didn't receive a comment back on a less visible post, to comment back on L3s to keep conversations going, as the communities I've focused on are ones I enjoyed on [website we don't name] and genuinely enjoyed engaging there. I did that semi-successfully, but didn't consider that the majority of people wouldn't want to even see a content bot, and that was my mistake.

Pride put to the side, lesson learned and hopefully L4s can continue to help.