idle thought #724

I feel like the demon of shinjuku thing is just them taking inspiration from, uh. “Lily”. I forget her actual name.

ao3 scambaiting

so this would be an unusual situation, but--if anyone out there has an interest in scambaiting and can write fanfiction, draw fanart, or do interesting meta/criticism in popular fandoms, there absolutely would be a way to go scambaiting on Ao3, because the number of scam artist comments is out of hand, and Ao3 is doing what it can but it's bad, ya'll.  (Basically, they'll a) write something really generic, b) pop your story into Chat-GPT to spit out a comment that looks a lot more legit, or c) just go right in for the kill [this piece inspired me!  I'm a commissions artist!  Hit me up here *insert link*].  If a) or b), usually they're smart enough to just go 'contact me on a different platform, usually email, instagram, or discord', where they'll then try to solicit you for 'art commissions'.  For those who have fallen for it or just are curious, it becomes clear that they'll way overprice it and then give you stolen or AI art.  I haven't gotten farther than a), b), or c) before I report them to Ao3, but having someone waste their time sounds nice.)  You would probably have to do a new piece now and again (just changing the publishing date is a jerk move), and couldn't just have a placeholder or something.  Alternatively, some people said they've gotten similar things on reddit, so you could just post in fanwriting subreddits and wait for a scammer to bite.
(Insert general disclaimer about 'examine how you feel about scambaiting because it's definitely more on the vigilante side of things' and 'don't go fishing if you don't know what you're doing because giving out your own personal info could be dangerous, make sure to use protections like vpn, aliases, etc')