FWIW, I didn’t think there was anything nefarious going on. The whole site can be trivially downloaded, if someone wants to collect info, and the questions weren’t especially probing.

Hello everyone, I am here to disclose that skipper1402 is an alt account made so that I can separate my regular posts from shower thoughts and other silly questions that are on my mind lately. I will also reply to this post with the account, confirming the ownership of the skipper alt account that was active on asklemmygrad. thank you for understanding.

I tend to ignore their questions because they’re generic and uninteresting. They also often feel like they’re framed to extract something while contributing no engagement themselves, which makes me somewhat distrustful of their motive.

Personally, I like engaging in discussions where someone has genuine interest and passion about about the subject. That just doesn’t exist with this user. Why ask a question and have no meaningful interaction with the response? That just doesn’t comport with typical human interaction in my experience; it feels more like filling out some kind of personality test (sidenote: always refuse to do those, esp of employers. You can sell your labour, but your mind and privacy are your own). If they are making some use of the feedback, it’s not demonstrated here.

At the most benign, maybe this user is just doing a poor job of starting conversations.

At the most malicious / tinfoil, they could be looking for specific opinions which may have been expressed on other social media and matching responses and speech patterns to potentially known real identities.

Can we unpin this now, please? No reason to continue dragging it out.

I think this user is likely benign, but they should avoid posting questions that could lead to opsec and security risks in the future.

I’ve avoided their question posts, because they look silly, boring and too personal. Sometimes they look like they are trying to generate reactions (like the Gonzalo boiling babies question). I don’t know if they are collecting info or not. My guess was that they were just being weird or they were a bot posting things from a list.

They’re an alt of cyberghost, and I tend to ignore the questions bc they’re boring.

I also know because they post most of the stuff from the accounts on matrix. Assuming their honesty, they’re just a terminally online dude with multiple lemmygrad accounts and way more Reddit alts lol. Yes, I find the way they engage online annoying. I don’t know if it’s suspicious.

Hello everyone, I am here to disclose that skipper1402 is an alt account made so that I can separate my regular posts from shower thoughts and other silly questions that are on my mind lately. I will also reply to this post with the account, confirming the ownership of the skipper alt account that was active on asklemmygrad. thank you for understanding.

deleted by creator

Nothing suspicious atm. Given the comments so far I can see they’re benign.

Off topic but this might be the buggiest thread in the history of lemmygrad

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.

WHY IS THIS SO BUGGY

I have not talked to them directly. Though I did try to ask them once about posting a rephrased question they had already asked and got no response, that post is here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4739013/4393187

Being curious on its own is not strange to me - what struck me as odd a while back is the phrasing of some of their questions, such as this one, which reads to me more like a “leading question” than a sincere inquiry when ignorant: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4575699

It is possible, of course, to ask questions in an ignorant way without having ill intent. But considering the nature of this space and the kind of opposition communism has, it strikes me as odd more so than normal.

I have some vague ideas that float in my head about why, but nothing concrete that seems worth sharing as more than wild speculation. I would more be interested in hearing them offer an explanation from their own perspective.

Skipper should not leak anything that could compromise the security of the instance. I haven’t interacted with Skipper yet. If he continues to collect info about use then our privacy might be compromised.