As some of you may be aware, over the past few weeks there have been an increasing number of what I suspect are bots which will share one or even a few posts, all relevant to the communities they are shared in, at which point the account self-deletes. I’m torn as the stories are relevant, but they give me the impression of a narrative attack. I’ve seen only one of these accounts actually comment before deletion, otherwise they post and immediately nuke the account.
I have tagged mods and admins but have not heard any recognition on the problem. It’s also notable that by my impression this issue is getting worse. I noticed yesterday that communities I subscribe to which previously have not had this problem are now starting to receive these kinds of posts.
I want the fediverse to be a place to communicate with real people in good faith; this manner of posting runs contrary to that. So that begs the questions, is this actually a problem, and if so, what can be done about it?
The person in question here is permanently banned from the Fediverse (effectively ban on sight for most instances) in part for spamming, but also because of maladaptive personality traits. They don’t accept that and instead still wish to “help” the fediverse via providing content (news spam)
Wait, do they keep reusing the same username? Because I feel like I’ve been playing wack-a-mole blocking a certain user, and it makes a lot of sense that they’d just be creating new accounts constantly
They tend to use similar names. Not always though. Not sure if you’re talking about the same person.
Strange. I may never understand their motivation (and don’t take this as me expecting you or anyone else to know) but why on Earth would anyone go to such lengths to “support” a platform that has obviously decided it wants nothing to do with them?
This is what blights so many small reddit alternatives.
The initial wave of users onto reddit clones often include a disproportionate amount of malcontents. A lot of people who don’t play well with others, who are banned from reddit (or at least banned from lots of subreddits) usually turn up first on these reddit alternatives and disrupt the community by repeatedly showing anti-social or disruptive, attention seeking behaviour. It’s not even necessarily related to any political persuasion. This stuff can collapse budding alternatives.
The first wave of new users on reddit alternatives are, in my experience, more likely to have a lot of problem users and since the sites are so small, and usually sparsely moderated, they are much more disruptive than they would be on reddit. The Fediverse is large enough to avoid the problems of that to some extent now (a problem user who makes alts to troll, and bait and harass is a lot more visible on a small reddit clone with 1000 users vs. 50,000) but there’s something to be said by growing and ignoring the problems (as Reddit itself had done - which is why it’s now a site utterly infested with bots and astroturfers and trolls etc).
The hope here is that the Fediverse can implement useful tools that disrupt the typical pattern of behaviour that these people present so they don’t increase and fester as the network grows. Best to nip this stuff now whilst the userbase is manageable.