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?

  • PonyOfWar@pawb.socialOPEnglish
    2·
    1 hour ago

    The ones mentioned in OP seem to be one user that is spreading their questions around multiple accounts, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if they’re posted at a rate that would be fine with a single account, and if they aren’t using more than one account in a particular thread.

    I don’t think they directly interact with each other, but they do upvote each other’s threads. Example

    Cheers for providing a different possible interpretation for those accounts. I didn’t see them comment on their deletions anywhere and as I wrote, my own attempts to reach out to them were only met with immediate deletions. It’s certainly possible that they’re human, even though I slightly lean towards the bot interpretation right now. Unfortunately, it’s just really hard to tell nowadays.