I’ve long noticed they were odd. Since we’re putting it out in the open. They’ve long glowed so to speak to me. They’re just off, not quite human, they don’t put any cards on the table yet ask questions all the time, they demand info from others yet contribute nothing, just fish and ask and ask without giving back.

Let’s start with two odd things though which deepen the puzzle.

1. Their name has a string of numbers at the end, it’s a word and then numbers. That’s a big red flag for persona-management software bot accounts, you see them all the time. Then again it could be a reddit carryover as redditors threw random numbers in their names.

2. They use a display name of “general” which I believe is designed to obfuscate their posts and confuse people into thinking they’re coming from a community called general and which on many apps appeared even more so.

On the point of this discussion I want to raise one very important thing: Lemmygrad like all of lemmy is public-ally viewable and scrapeable. Banning this person wouldn’t prevent them from viewing and collecting data. It wouldn’t stop them from creating a new account and if they can pass vetting once they can do so twice (if their account pre-dates vetting like mine then maybe there’s something to be said for that).

I think they are very suspicious. I’ve long thought they were suspicious. If someone had created a private space for ML’s here and I was invited into it the first thing I would say is “don’t let this person in”.

They’re trawling for info, they’re doing it fairly carefully, they’re not being super obvious but they could definitely have done better for example if I were an intelligence agency I’d have gone about it a bit more sophisticatedly (I won’t elaborate to avoid giving anyone ideas).

That or they have some unhealthy obsession with Just Asking Questions type posting that risks compromising security, makes them look strange, and which I think would get them kicked out of any org because they’re not a constructive member and they are setting off alarm bells with their behavior.

For all I know they could be a spammer account playing the long game trying to age up on lemmy as if it’s reddit and they’re half automated with some sort of AI. That would be fairly benign, there are other options a lot more concerning that range from fed intelligence, fed police, state/local police, private forces of capital that liaison with above, private “researcher” types (note: no above board real sociologists could be running their account as those always disclose to subjects who they are, it’s a basic rule. but it could be like those computer science professor nerds from Canada who wrote that paper on extremism about us using data-scraping), to professional anti-communist activist trying to do doxing in the weirdest and perhaps least effective way yet (though if they’re very patient maybe they’re trying to normalize their question asking and presence first and are willing to wait years for fruit).

Hell they could be some sort of AI bot. Remember Grace and those bots she ran to generate engagement here early on? That type of thing run by someone for benevolent, malevolent, or simply orthogonal reasons such as training.

I’m not sure banning them would necessarily accomplish anything. If they’re a determined actor they might just return and perhaps take greater pains to hide their actions. I’d be interested to see how they react, if they have anything to say for themselves at all that resolves any questions. At least right now we know their name, and most people who’ve been paying attention know their history when they see it. That’s worth something, more than banning them and having them come back on another account and having to spot this suspicious behavior all over again with the disadvantage that they know we’re onto them and know they must adapt to avoid being banned again.

As long as it’s all kept public anyways and people behave rationally in terms of opsec I’m not sure they’re anything but a curiosity and occasional annoyance. And a celebrity one at that now at this point.