What3Words users

[Dolphinnoises]

Has anyone noticed the behaviour of posters with odd three words usernames? I don’t mean three words that make sense, I mean completely random words like you’d get with a What3Words reference. The posts always seem to be encouraging Mumsnet to “do its thing” or revisit major MN talking points. Another poster referred to them the other week (sorry, I can’t remember which one) and since then I can’t unsee it. I’m pretty sure they’re being used to scrape for AI…

Is it an auto option for new registrations? I have noticed a general upswing in goadiness and trolling from a high number of those accounts. Not all of them but enough to stand out.

Always starts with ‘To think’

It looks like it's the default option when registering a new account.

Why would someone need to create an account for site content to be scraped?

They come up as suggested usernames for new users. I had to create a temporary account a few months ago and it offered me a selection of random two and three word usernames.

So it may be the behaviour you're seeing is that of newbies not familiar with the site, or some of them might be new accounts created by bot-types for marketing/research/whatever non-genuine reasons.

Ah, useful to know.

In terms of why AI would bother, I think to refine its offering. There are a lot of jobs on LinkedIn if you work in cons with are essentially fine-tuning large language models.