I follow various “question-based” communities like AskLemmy, NoStupidQuestions etc and I have noticed some strange patterns recently. Mainly that some topics come up over and over again, like Nintendo Switch 2, foreign alphabets and foreign languages (especially Japanese). The users asking these questions will often (but not always) delete them after about an hour.
Looking into it further I’ve so far found 5 different accounts asking these questions. 4 of them have very similar profile pictures of characters from FPS video games (Battlefield, CoD and Metro), and they were all created between march 22nd and march 29th. On a recent thread of one of them, I asked them whether they were all alt-accounts. They immediately deleted the thread.
On a similar note, I asked another one of them about their thread deletions about a week ago. Once again, it got deleted rather quickly.
Sooo… Is the dead internet finally coming to Lemmy and we’re seeing an influx of LLM-based bot users which are given instructions on specific topics to talk about, as well as delete any thread where they’re called out? Or am I just being paranoid? Have you noticed any similar patterns on Lemmy recently?
Yes, the ones you mentioned. At least these accounts and threads are not always deleted. It’s happened before on lemmy that multiple posts get made on the same topic by new accounts and then both the post and account get deleted. I remember similar around last year so it’s not new.
What I don’t get is why. This time some of the posts are actually interesting and generate discussions but the OP never interacts with any comments. What do they gain from this?
I’m not sure either, but there are 2 scenarios I can think of:
I doubt anyone would see the old posts after they’re edited. The second point makes sense I guess.
yes, #2 is exactly how they do it on reddit, they try to get past the filters by making innocous post, albeit its quite easy to detect those too as well, they are likely the same bots over here too.