Agreed. The only downside was that I wasn't in on the joke and that quite a bit of the backlash was directed at me, not at the people running the bots.
I also think that it would be prudent for anybody that intends to run any kind of bot on HN to ask PG for permission.
When reading Jacques' post on his blog, I immediately thought RiderOfGiraffes must be up to one of his social experiments with the community.
FWIW, I find your 'work' interesting and the chilled out approach to it, doubly so.