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?
Not related to bots but more about account deletion, something I’ve been wishing for a long time is to make a separation between a user being able to delete their account if they fancy so and their content actually being removed. Content could just be anonymized or, at least, if the content is to actually be removed, a placeholder should be put in its place because when they delete their account not only do they delete their own posts but they also delete all comments made by other participants which is unfair and can also be a real loss as some comments are really interesting.
I highly agree we have to deal with deleted content in a different way. Not only because of the loss of content but also because I think people running bots are combing through their comments once a day and deleting anything that would throw suspicion.