I’m noticing a pattern starting to develop in the community I mod (just barely – it’s only happened 3 times so far) where a user that posts a fairly large amount of relevant content occasionally posts weird spam with a title of alternating letter nonsense (e.g. “zazaz” or “sdsdsds”) and a link that goes to some random domain that serves nothing but a default 404 error (as in the domain is registered and there’s a server responding to requests, but there’s no content for it to serve).
I suppose it could just be bad behavior on the part of said users, but it feels more like a bug or their account getting hijacked or something. Anybody have any insight?
During one of the mass exodus events from Reddit to Lemmy, a lot of people started using these tools they would install to automatically scrub and obfuscate their Reddit comments and posts history. Often these tools would replace posts with random letters and even nonsense links because there was suspicion that outright deleted posts could be detected and then programmatically restored if Reddit really wanted to get that user content back.
I suspect these tools probably exist for Lemmy as well and you are seeing users with long comment histories use them because those also happen to be the users who have a lot of previous content to cover up/obfuscate to maintain/ensure their own privacy.