It's worse. Instead of pure, blatant disruption and chaos it has also convinced people that spam is "interesting". Agent reply bots is basically an IQ test and a lot of the NPC's here are failing it miserably

And I say this as one of the thickest people here

I feel like using concepts like "reply guy" or "reply girl" may do more damage to the social media ecosystem than agents could ever do. These terms are at the same time vague and condescending. It's like "trolls" and others of these relatively vacuous concepts. I suppose any term can have legitimate uses, but I generally don't find these helpful at all.

I can't be sure what fiatjaf meant, but I read that as "ReplyGuy and ReplyGirl" which was a wave of spam attacks on nostr. The accounts were called this. I didn't read it as "reply guy" the humans doing this. But I could be wrong. It changes the meaning quite a lot.

That was spam too, but there is a big difference. The Reply Guy was easy to detect with 100% accuracy, through a hand-written filter. Some used a less precise filter based on the string "reply guy", rather than the full content for the post, but a perfect filter was possible. Even later bots, like the one that scrambled the post it was replying to, instead of copying it, were easy to detect algorithmically. I still have those filters active. These new bots are not easy to detect programmatically.