Uh oh.
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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There have been a couple of people who've ousted themselves for doing it shortly before they deleted the accounts.
So it tells me there are some very lonely losers out there, spending all of their free time, doing this.
Some guy yesterday with a one day old account said something vaguely related to the post that sounded like an AI wrote it trying to sound human.
I tried to coax the LLM into a nonsense response but instead two people responded and I received -10 votes.
Looking into both their content history, it's clearly the same person.
People are testing the abuse of no guardrails on Lemmy. It will get worse before a solution is created.
People are testing the abuse of no guardrails on Lemmy. It will get worse before a solution is created.
Literally why humans can't have nice things
I've noticed that for at least the last year.
it has gotten considerably worse in the last six months though.
I haven't noticed this at all and now I'm concerned that I've interacted with/upvoted bots :/
it's likely you haven't had interactions with them since you don't have many comments posted. for example I have almost 3600 comments since 2024. I don't even know if that covers the amount that I have deleted either, so it could be more.
As a mod I can answer the last part of your question: If it looks like a bot, smells like a bot, acts like a bot, guess what it is?; A duck.
And ducks get banned.
Just to clarify: Only the ones trying to pass as human. Utility bots (and ducks) are OK provided they are marked as such. Creating sockpuppet accounts for later use is not. While the boards I mod don't explicitly have rules against bots, zero interaction repost bots hoping to farm some upvotes do not help the community.
Utility bots (and ducks) are OK provided they are marked as such
Far too few utility ducks around here; marked or not!
The ones that bug me the most come out of nowhere, make 30 to 50 posts in an hour, then delete themselves.
I stay on top of it in my communities and ban them as soon as I see them, but they still flood new and other communites that are basically unmodded. 😟
I still sincerely want to know what are they trying to accomplish? What is their end goal? And then after all the things they upload, why do they delete their accounts? Who are they? Is there something nefarious going on here? I'm pretty sure there is no money involved in Lemmy so it can't be financially motivated, or is it?
I PM'd one of the accounts before they self immolated and got AN answer, I don't BUY the answer, but it is AN answer. 😉
That is an interesting & weird answer he gave 🤔 I wonder how far he goes to reduce his social media footprint and why he goes to such extreme efforts? I wonder if he buys a new burner phone every time he makes a new social media account then shitposts everywhere then deletes everything. Very weird. What are his motivations & end goals?? There is no financial gain, there is no social gain, what else would people's motives be?
Yup I'm seeing it, and then people wonder why there were so many rules on reddit banning posting until you had so much karma. Because bad actors spoil it for everyone.
I usually sort by subscribed so... IDK what is going on here
As a mod of !fuckcars, I've been getting reports of stuff being posted by new accounts that pretty much immediately get deleted (not banned, as far as I can tell; deleted by the owner). I feel like there's something fucky going on, but I'm not sure what should be done because the content being posted is legitimately on-topic and there's no user to take action against anymore.
It bothers me that I don't understand the motive.
The fact it’s on topic makes me wonder if they’re meant to drum up engagement, like when new small multiplayer games use bots as opponents to make the game feel more popular. Fake it till you make it.
I've been banning them as bad faith engagement. If they post and don't own their post by maintaining the account, why are they bothering? 🤔
Random question. Did it only start happening less than two months ago, after I joined? I suspect that the IDF has followed me here.
I'm not on that community but in World, Europe and Politics community I've seen this issue too. Don't recognize that alias with the numbers though. But a new user posts a whole lot for 3 hours and then deletes it's own account. And then gets a new account. Repeat.
See also ex. this post on Lemmy/support.
add: fyi a solution: Tesseract and Voyager have filters for accounts< 1 month old
This is is Voyager? I don't see it
should be an icon somewhere when accounts are < 1 months. See this picture it has this yellow thingy next to poster name <1 day
No real filter option as such, like Tesseract, but it helps for the " filtering".
I got banned from RPGmemes for apparently boosting a bot account. So no idea.
Had a similar issues, and could contact a mod with an alt account to get unbanned, but indeed looks like they used a nuke to kill a Goblin.
Also, I still don't get the point for bot to post "engaging content". At worst it's a bit too cliché you wake up in the body of the last person you ask with or too rage-baity Say something good or bad about Israel but it's not like karma is worth something here.
Is that why they ban people? I got banned from that Community I have no idea why, never got a notification, I try to look it up in the mod log and I couldn't find it.
Nope. Any examples?
Because they spam post with brand new accounts, they often get reported and all of their content taken down within a few hours
I mean I pretty much browse new and see almost everything. Do you have any specific examples?
I haven't, but I've seen another thread about it. Someone said that PieFed blocks this activity, but last time I looked at the thread, nobody had a good answer for why someone's using the system like that.
Reposting was basically a business on Reddit, but Lemmy isn't big enough AND these accounts don't stick around.
Yep happens a lot over at the Shitpost community and then you have the ones over at politics spamming news articles. It's weird.
It's government bots. Trying to make star trek more popular than Star wars.
It's CEO of Linux trying to brainwash us! /s
What about Star Gate?