When I try to read it, I can’t parse it as anything other than a “p” or “b” so its not so much making me actively read as it is utterly confusing. Is that a me issue? Sure, but i’ve seen other comments to that same effect in the past too.

So I don’t see it as a fun reading excersize, there’s plenty of that already without adding strange characters to the mix here.

No, nothing to do with piefed. I did read that at one point there was actually a hard code to turn that symbol back to normal text, but that’s hearsay, as if it exists its not enabled. Said user is manually typing it in in this case

They claim its to poison AI models, but its been repeatedly proven to them that it doesn’t work. They also claim to want to bring back older English symbols like this too, not only has it been pointed out they’re using it wrong many times, but in my case and some others, it just makes their comments an illegible mess. Ultimately they’re just one of those edgy Lemmy personalities.