I can understand the desire to get as many downvotes as possible on reddit. I don’t sympathize, but I can at least see where people are coming from. Because Reddit gives you that total and shows it to you.
And I’m sure it’s possible to use an API to really that number up on Lemmy, but “total karma” doesn’t seem to be something Lemmy cares about by default, so where is the motivation coming from?
Is it just the same reason people have always been trolls? Because I’ve never quite understood that, either
Same thing I’ve been wondering about the spammers. Like, ok, you thought you left a mark? But few people will remember your username and the mods will just bulk-delete your shit. I don’t get it. Too much effort, time and probably some money for literally nothing.
Who spams obvious malware/scam links here? Facebook, I get it and expect it to work there. If you found your way here, you at leas have some understanding of what spam is and how to avoid clicking the melt my PC button.
Who clicks on those? Who pays for those? How is it actually profitable? Who the hell is moving that many boner pills?
The one I’m thinking of was recent but wasn’t related to a scam afaik. It seemed like they just wanted to annoy the admins, but their act got cleaned up rather quickly after going scorched Earth by spamming nonsense because their original account got banned or whatever. It was petty af.
Someone recently spammed a popular community with about a hundred copies of a hate message + an unmarked nsfw image. I reported it as I’m sure everyone else who saw them did, taken down very swiftly, thanks mods.
But in that case as with many others I think the goal literally is just to put hate and the threat of violence before people’s eyes. Even if only for a few minutes, maybe a vulnerable person sees it and it ruins their day. Real scum of the earth mentality
Spamming is just a numbers game. The bad actor is likely running a script to automatically post as much as it can before it gets caught and banned and the content deleted. It’s super hard to proactively catch but relatively easy to clean up once it is. The usernames aren’t really a person but just an account used to spam.
There is almost no effort, no cost, and no time spent which is why it’s so prevalent.