I realize that maybe the intent of people that wrote those bots was to fill this subreddit with Bitcoin related content, but in practice they indeed just send our users back to /r/bitcoin. And the result also looks pretty bad for us: a subreddit filled with posts that have no comments from users.

I have in the past encouraged people to post content from /r/bitcoin here, but the way I did it in those few times was to create a new post (manually), quote OP and reference him/her by /u/... so they see that people are discussing their post here as well. I think including a short link at the bottom for the OP is not only okay but also recommended, as long as it is not done in the main link-part of the post, which has the effect of just directing people to the discussion in /r/bitcoin by default..

BTW, TotesMessenger was not bad IMO because it only let's people here know that a discussion initated in this subreddit has been referred at another subreddit, which should have the effect of brining people here, not the other way around.