It really is one of the most harmless, albeit deeply bizarre, recurring behaviors you can run into on a forum. They are creating new accounts every 4-6 weeks to leave mild, highly specific textbook summaries before deleting them and/or walking away. Over and over.

When you dig into something you never know what you will find. Down one path I found an eccentric mind. Strange activity from a strange actor. Not so strange when you look at it that way.

Down another path I found an unknown number of individuals who strongly believe they are providing an essential service by covertly scraping content from reddit on the hour and posting it to the threadiverse. They are not bots. They are humans using bespoke software to bulk scrape, batch, and queue posts. @[email protected] is fully informed of it.

Threadiverse opinions on the value of this activity are mixed.

Out of the 37,000 people who voted for posts or comments in the last month, the 10 most prolific voters (0.02% of us) cast as many votes as the bottom 59%. Here’s how that looks, visually:

As you can see, a lot of people didn’t cast many votes. Someone cast 23k votes, with a group of 13 each casting at least 10k votes.

“But of course most people aren’t really engaged, most of those 37k people are just NPCs who don’t really matter” you say, “Rimu you’re just including them to make it seem worse than it is”, you might say. Ok, cool, let’s pretend the bottom 85% of us don’t matter and just look at the top 5000 voters. Here’s how the distribution looks among them:

Still super unbalanced. Let’s analyze this a bit.

Among those 5000, the top 147 (2.94%) cast as many votes as all the others (4853 people) combined. Among those 5000, the average number of votes cast in a month is 1142. Among the top 147, the average number of votes cast in a month is 6868.

How do you feel about a tiny group having this much influence over what news you receive?

Like others, I have noticed a cluster of accounts that are clearly run by the same operator.

This group posts hyper-specific questions and usually, but not always, answers their own question in the post where they asked it.

I noticed that every so often a post with a different writing style shows up from a member of the cluster. One that seems more like a real person and less like an LLM. These usually do not answer their own question.

I’ve been puzzling over what the point of this could be for a while. Tonight I had an idea. Maybe the point is to hide the operator’s actual person posts in with the noise of the LLM generated posts?

It’s very strange…

Maybe you are simply perplexed by the activity of certain accounts you keep running into. It doesn’t seem malicious but there is something off. You want to solve the mystery.

If that is you then this is the place to discuss it!