Have you seen one of these dipshits? If you post regularly on ao3, chances are YES, but more likely you didn't notice nor suspect it was a bot. Sometimes they start off nice, or even praise you before getting nasty out of nowhere, like so:

But much like Grok, their newest obsession is nazism.

I don't know where they come from, or what purpose this could possibly serve other than suicidebaiting random people in the internet, I guess; but apparently they've started parroting names from real users to send these comments and shifting their general length to go by undetected. Maybe those are scrappers trying to train 'reviewbots' to be sold as part of some scam service promising to give feedback for newbie writers, who the fuck knows.

Here are more examples of the tone and backhanded compliments you can find in these:

I'm also going to add an additional Fanfic Oldster reminder: while some of the people behind some of the bots likely have Big Hidden Reasons for this, some of these are likely just the result of the shitty commenters and trolls who've been around the fanfic community for ages. In FFN days it resulted in a lot of jokey author's notes like 'any flames [trollish or hateful comments] will be used to roast marshmallows'. It was that expected. It happened on LiveJournal. It happened on old forums. A few of my friends in Ye Olden Days used to joke you knew you'd become a real fic author when you got your first nasty comment, and yes, the lazier shitty comments were often just copy pastes onto multiple stories in hopes of getting reaction. That's exactly what some of these bot creators are - lazy hecklers who've found a way to spread the insults wider than they could before. And fanfic is an insanely easy target.

1. a hopeful, if complicated, future

2. the most batshit insane gay subtext youve ever seen in your life