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?
I’ve felt this way recently regarding the influx of censored posts/memes.
I’ve been here for 3 years now and I’ve seen more self censored shit in the past couple months than I’ve ever seen here before.
I’ve more than once wondered if these posts weren’t getting made by bots and wondered if the people defending self censorship aren’t also bots
That and constant overusage of emdashes.
PreLLM you would rarely see a dash unless it was to connect a cut-off work or combine (like how I just used). Now it’s on everything that really should be used with a comma.