Looking through this blog you probably don’t see a lot of comments. I don’t know why, honestly. I guess this isn’t the sort of blog where people like to post things like “loved this” or “you’re a total tool” or what have you. The blog does see about 200,000 visitors a month, so I know people are reading it. They’re just not generally engaging with it.
Honestly I’m ok with that. I’ll admit it was a little dent to my self-esteem at one point but I’m over it. I’m just glad I can help folks out there and that sometimes people might get a chuckle when reading some of the off-topic stuff.
But, truth is, there are about 30-50 comments a day on this site. You just don’t see them. The spam systems in place here catch them quite efficiently. Honestly I don’t even see most of them, because they’re caught before I can see them. I do see a few, though, and it makes me wonder.
Spammers have to know…
The people who flood sites like this with ads for porn or pirated software or what have you… they have to know it’s not going to work. I mean, these things are never going to be seen publicly. I’m sure they’re all computer generated and it costs next to nothing to create these comments. But why even try in the first place? Where’s the return on investment?
I ask the same thing when it comes to robocalls, or the roughly 50 calls a month I get from the same call center trying to get me to use their home improvement and solar services. Does this ever work for anyone? I mean, does anyone ever click on a link in a comment and buy drugs from it? Does anyone ever invite someone to their home with no credentials and say, “hey go ahead, drill holes in my roof. I’m cool with that?”
I don’t understand the economics of it, that’s all. Even if it’s insanely cheap to flood our eyes and ears with these sort of promotions, why would you do it if it never ever works?
The other kind of spam I get that I really really don’t understand
So, in addition to the straight out ads, sometimes I get comments like this one:
What a great article I can’t wait to share this with others. Thank you
Which, ok, fine I’m glad you like the article. But it’s so obvious that a robot wrote this. I’ll often get the same exact comment from five different users from the same IP address, so it’s not like it’s going to fool anyone who’s paying attention.
What’s the goal here? Get me to publish your comment so that you can then hack my site? Or do you think that if you compliment me, I’m going to be more likely to visit your porn site sometime later in the day?
The spammer economy makes no sense and never has.
That’s my bottom line here. Even back in the days before the internet, it made no sense. Robocalls were a little different then, but believe it or not there were plenty of them. Businesses used machines with tape recorders. I’ve seen them. And, there used to be a service called WATS (Wikipedia link so you don’t think I’m making it up) that let you make free calls to a large area. The service cost money but it was a lot cheaper than making thousands of long-distance calls.
Of course spam grew like a weed when email came around. No one really anticipated it, or there would have been protections in place from day one. But, eventually companies like Google figured out how to screen most of it, thankfully. Then of course it moved back to robocalls. It does seem like there’s finally some improvement there, thanks to the FCC. It’s not perfect, but it’s better.
So now we’re back to real people dialing numbers, and this odd proliferation of comment spam. As I said, I don’t know how it pencils out, how anyone ever makes money on it, but they must, right? Or eventually it would just stop, right?
The tin foil hat type in me…
…can’t help but wonder if the whole thing has been some sort of organized operation all along. It would be too easy to assume that the goal would be to create some sort of bot army by infecting your computers and phones. That’s just too linear. But taking it further, is the proliferation of these little annoyances designed to hide something else in our reality? Or is it some sort of weird communication system?
A while back there was some talk about people using Twitter as a clandestine communications app. It was said that people would post harmless-looking messages that could be combined to tell a bigger story. Could comment spam be that as well? It honestly makes more sense than anything else I can think of.
Meanwhile, go ahead and leave a comment on this article. I dare ya. Let’s see if it makes it through the spam management.
