I have noticed some very odd behavior in !comicstrips@lemmy.world. I saw by chance that a user no longer existed shortly after making a handful of posts on !comicstrips@lemmy.world. I made a comment about it and a user responded very rudely and accusatory, which raised a red flag. I clicked on that user’s profile and, once again, that user seems to no longer exist. This struck me as very odd.

So I started paying attention to the users of posts on !comicstrips@lemmy.world, and I now see that this is a very frequently recurring pattern: A new user is created and posts about 3-8 comics in a span of about 3-24hrs and then the user’s account disappears. Every day this happens, sometimes with multiple accounts.

Since you can’t view the user’s profiles you can’t see what other kind of posts or comments these users are making and it seems very suspicious. It seems like a single person or group of people are taking advantage of some sort of system that creates short-term accounts? Is there some service or bot that does this sort of thing that I am unaware of?

Though the behavior I’ve found here is only making some posts on the comicstrips community, besides the one rude comment, it still is a giant red flag. Is this happening in other communities? What other behavior is being hidden by using burner accounts? What benefits could there possibly be for this? Are communities being manipulated somehow? Surely it makes no sense that someone would anyone go out of their way to constantly create new accounts just to post comics?

I also wonder how other people feel about this. Am I alone in thinking this is weird and a big red flag?