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?
Those have been active for a few months now and usually get banned from most (non-ask) communities quite quickly.
What concerns me more is despite how obvious it is that they are bots, the posts often seem to get a lot of engagement from other accounts that are both human and some less obvious bots (or maybe lurkers).
Guilty as charged. I knew Lt.Dan was likely a bot, but his (it’s?) questions were interesting and engagement seemed high so I said fuck it and responded anyway.
I think there's value in responding to some posts. I hope myself and another user were able to steer some men away from the obvious young woman trying to bait them into a romance scam.