Comic Strips

I am pinning this post because I think it is a global Lemmy problem, and debating this issue is necessary to find ways to decrease this type of spam.

Personally, I am reluctant to implement solutions like 'account age verification' or 'maximum daily posts' because this also affects legitimate users. However, we may need to do this if we do not find better solutions.

It's mostly annoying me because it's affecting federation - not just the ability for new instances to backfill content, but for established instances to even be able to fully resolve a new post's details before the author nukes themselves. For example, the previous post (titled "Paranoia") isn't available on lemmy.ml or lemmy.dbzer0 because they would have been a few seconds "too late" to fetch the details for the author.

@lawrence@lemmy.world - if you'd like another mod to help out in the short term, I'm happy to volunteer. I realise people in the comments are being a bit defeatist about the ability to reckon with this problem, but whoever this person is should at least have to do a bit more work than they're currently doing.

I tried bringing this up and got downvoted pretty hard last week. We have accounts that will post a huge amount, slam servers all in one go, then disappear. Its causing issues with federation. Especially with smaller instances.

I like comics and prior to say a couple of months ago, it was a great conmunity.

I'm not sure a simple rule to prevent new account (less than X days)

This would work reasonably for about X days. Maybe.

...and obviously I can't see any of it because their posts are gone, too?
Can you put some numbers on this?
Can anybody confirm?

It could be some sort of Streisand effect brought on by people complaining about "bot accounts" for days/weeks now.
People thinking something like "You scared of trolls? Lol, let's troll you some more!"

Also, some of those accused seem like very normal people to me who also comment in other communities and do not, in fact, delete their account.

edit: somebody created an account 1h ago, only to downvote every single comment in this thread. No content.

FWIW most of these "kamikaze" accounts seem to be on the lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works instances. I think lemmy.world might require an admin to manually approve new accounts -- there's a delay between application and account creation. And they explicitly state they don't allow people to create accounts using temporary email addresses.

sh.itjust.works seems to allow anonymous account creation. Still, it might not be bots/API abuse; the accounts might actually be created by hand by someone very motivated to post and delete for... some reason.

But why these two instances in particular, I wonder?

Daaamn I was also thinking about writing a post after yesterday "men bad" comics, I support doing something. Ban specific comic authors?

Edit 2: and now I'm getting downvotes on my posts/comments, even old ones, at least I've pissed off the troll

I've noticed a ton of these too: it seemed to have started right around New Year's.

As someone who typically scrolls All, I'm not even sure if it's specific to this community. There are a lot of Comic and Meme communities where these things are getting posted across various instances. I'm still not sure whether this is nefarious or someone trying to grow Lemmy. Could just be some college student trying to test out making bots, posting things they genuinely like. Though I have noticed most of the comics tend to em have divisive elements or say things that are obviously wrong. It seems like their goal might be to drive comment engagement.

So I've been marking them with UserNotes as "Comic Bot" and usually just do voting and moving on. Occasionally commenting to draw attention to the user history for others.

I think the way forward as the next line of defense is to vet accounts. This has been suggested before and I believe quite a few instances do it already. Similar thing on Mastodon.

It doesn't have to be a strict process, to start with anyway, but at least require people to write a quick paragraph of why they want to join.

It does mean more work, though. But I think if it became the norm, instances can be straight-up blocked who don't do have this process, even if many people use it. As people will see the good stuff is elsewhere and anyone who cares enough will do this little extra step. (the philosophy of being active in good places to grow them)

Other people have written about this more eloquently and with stronger arguments. :)

I also noticed the accounts don't even exist anymore. They create community posts, and somehow delete themselves.

1. 🧵 v. /u/
2. 🧵 v. 🤖

Another idea is to work with it in the meantime. Threads like this make people aware. Comics that make fun of this stuff or show the opposite side of the coin, etc.

Alright, I spammed the thread enough 🤐

Edit: they made a "tatann_2" account to post a few comics so it's obviously a troll

Edit 2: and now I'm getting downvotes on my posts/comments, even old ones, at least I've pissed off the troll

You too huh? I made a similar comment and got the same downvote brigading and copycat account shit.

Cockroaches really don’t like it when you shine a light on them.

Mods really need to do something about this shit.

Looking at the Lemvotes stats on this post is interesting.

A good deal of the downvotes are from accounts made to look like other, prominent users who frequently post that have also made comments/posts about this bullshit.

Here is yet another post with the same observation: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/53070513

Yep, I called out a bot and before I knew it 5 other accounts started jumping on me with "and what? and what?", followed by a flurry of downvotes on all my other comments.

Link: https://feddit.uk/post/42881844/22662752

Funny as hell, because the extra downvotes on my generally banal comments suddenly made them "controversial" and I was getting a lot more replies

This seems to be rising to a problem that would require admin level tools.

Just a thought.

If lemmy had a shared tag system, and easier way would be for automod to tag new users and auto delete posts from users that delete themselves.

That way everyone would know its a new user posting and could just choose to take the post with skepticism.

A non-exhaustive record of accounts that have posted and deleted themselves. Not sure what to do with the info, but maybe someone else does. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯