Whats going on in YSK?

What’s with all the brand new accounts that post random YSKs then delete their profile? There are a lot of these in YSK and I can’t figure out why.

20 comments

You should know what's going on.

Not sure, but I wonder if it's seen as an "easy" community to post in? There's not a strict sense of what's appropriate, and a lot of posts are just a link to an article, with "YSK" + a rewording of the article headline as the title.
It's also one of the bigger communities, so posting a random article about a storm or laptops will get a decent amount of upvotes in a few hours.
Given that it mostly seems to be new accounts, I wonder if it'd be worth requiring a minimum age of a week or two before users can create a post?
- I think the fediverse is already seen as inaccessible enough as it is.
  
  Yeah, I know what you mean. Asking people to join and then not be able post seems a bit shit. Same with the light moderation in most communities, when there's a comparatively low level of posts, do we really want to be removing posts for being "off topic"?
  But I also think that can backfire. I'm pretty close to leaving YSK and mildlyinfuriating because it feels that half the posts are just variations on politics. The tagine of "YSK" is a place for all the things to make your life easier. Looking back through the last 20 posts >75% are to do with politics, bad people and their misdeeds. I hate Boris Johnson, and people should be told he's a corrupt ass hole, but we have communities for politics which is where that belongs.
  Ragebait is always going to do well, it's how our brains are wired. So if we don't want all communities to end up being mostly "this is bad, you should be angry and sad" then we need stricter moderation. It's a mistake to think more posts = more content. If most of the main communities of lemmy are overrun by these kinds of posts, the only new users it's going to attract are people who want that, and the problem snowballs.
- I'm seeing the same sort of behavior in !fuckcars, and that community does (or at least should) have a pretty strong sense of what's appropriate.
  The kicker is, the stuff being posted is appropriate — in fact, often higher quality than the memes some of the established users post — so I'm at a bit of a loss as to what I (as a mod) should be doing about it.
- I wonder if it’d be worth requiring a minimum age of a week or two before users can create a post?
  Fuck no, that way lies reddit.

YSK: lemmy growth passed the appealing-to-spammers threshold a long time ago; please do report spam to help mods/admins see and delete it
- I can’t tell if it’s actually spam since some of them posts seem to be relevant. The user just deleted the account right after. That’s why it caught my attention. I just ignore, downvote, or report spam when I see it.
  
  I would say that that counts as spamming

It seems to be one person that's doing it manually across a number of communities?

seems like it's one or very few people, i don't understand why they're doing that. same with those AI generated spam threads..

Because it's a fuck wit being a fuck wit. I report them all as spam post from a deleted account.
- Yeah but it’s super weird bc it’s not regular spam. Some are relevant YSK posts, but they just delete the account after posting.
  
  Maybe it's a test to see if they can make the bot convincing enough to fool people and delete the ones that don't.

@lwadmin@lemmy.world this may be worth looking into, something smells off.

Are the posts still up? Can you link them?
- https://lemmy.world/post/39499201 https://lemmy.world/post/39490841 https://lemmy.world/post/39379258 https://lemmy.world/post/39401080 https://lemmy.world/post/39443812 https://lemmy.world/post/39251915 https://lemmy.world/post/39294224 https://lemmy.world/post/38937776 https://lemmy.world/post/38770260
  Just looking at the last 20 posts (including this one), these 9 are all links to ragebait news stories from accounts that are now deleted and have similar random usernames. Of the remaining 11, one is a weird downvoted post from a deleted account, 2 are politics posts but from active users. Just over a quarter of the posts are actually about interesting/useful information.
  
  The only non-lemmy.world account: Melon Husk™@sh.itjust.works
  Banned in some community because: Widely reported as a likely unmarked bot using an LLM to generate engagement bait
  (Profile not deleted)
  telokic, sededor, pali, Yecoh, vanes, henaw2, kogito @lemmy.world: gone
  All post sorta normal news stories as "YSK".
  As others probably pointed out already, this is likely somebody playing with LLM bots (unmarked). Good riddance. Not sure about the first one though.

Mods absent, evidently.

20 comments