I’ve been noticing recently that a lot of posts in large communities are from [deleted] users (see the image at the bottom of this post for an example). I assume this is a means of pre-emptive ban-evasion and block-evasion by a user who is either running their own instance or just signing up a lot of accounts.

I quite like piefed’s warning labels that appear on posts by users with low karma, and I also quite like being able to block users who spam my feed, and I feel like this post-then-delete-account tactic is an exploit to bypass any kind of accountability on the poster’s part.

Here are some suggestions for how this problem could be mitigated:

• When a user deletes their account, their posts will no longer display in the Subscribed/Local/All feeds. Perhaps only showing if you visit the community page directly, or
• A post by a deleted user is down-ranked in the Top/Hot/Popular ranking system so that it appears much further down the page, or
• De-federate from the instance(s) that are allowing these post-then-delete-account tactics without intervention. Particularly if they are personal instances run by the individual who is doing this.

I haven’t managed to catch a before/after of one of these posts to see what the username/domain looks like, but I imagine instance admins should be able to see the history of the post?

Example (and yes these were 7 consecutive posts in my feed all with the same issue):