{"id":2086,"date":"2021-07-13T16:27:45","date_gmt":"2021-07-13T20:27:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yule-tide.generalsemiotics.net\/?p=2086"},"modified":"2021-07-13T16:27:45","modified_gmt":"2021-07-13T20:27:45","slug":"post-414-low-energy-spamming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/2021\/07\/13\/post-414-low-energy-spamming\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-414: Low-Energy spamming"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This website was getting lots of spam for a while (which I first mentioned back in spring 2020<\/a>). It became much less so after some skillful behind-the-scenes changes by my generous host J. W now of “Rockpit, Alaska.” Without which this place looked truly abandoned, the quantity and quality of the spam as tumbleweeds in a digital desert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes they still come through in spurts anyway. Often they target one post in particular, seemingly at random, and dump a small mountain on it, with others mostly spared. In the recent few days, I got about sixty comments in a few days over a small and long-forgotten post from 2013, “Ten U.S. Bombers<\/a>.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is one of the ones I’ve gotten today, and I want to point to the poor quality:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Olymp Trade De Confianza
[website omitted]
80.241.217.167<\/p>

Hi! Someone in my Myspace group shared this website with us so I came to check it out. I\u2019m definitely enjoying the information. I\u2019m book-marking and will be tweeting this to my followers! Wonderful blog and wonderful design and style<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

MySpace group? Who is running this spam campaign? You might think it was left over from 15 years ago, but then it also adds he will be “tweeting this.” So what kind of effort was this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Talk about “not sending their best.” Googling the same introductory phrase (“Hi! Someone in my Myspace group shared…”) appears 162,000 times. Quantity over Quality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the the 2010s I started seeing people saying that it was getting harder and harder to distinguish “spam” from real comments\/people (scripts running ads or trying to spam links around).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The purpose of spam like this is to get one’s links spread far an wide, to seed the Internet with it, and boost traffic. The company purports to be an online stock trading platform. Assuming someone with the trading company is behind the spam, they must think the link-seeding strategy is worth the risk of looking bad by dumping low-quality spam on people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And this is so obviously spam it’s like gearing up a Wright Brothers plane in early jet age, or proposing to send a letter by express horseman to hand-deliver in the age of the telegraph, or investing the royal treasury in hiring and outfitting the best new pikemen in the age of the musket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even in the 2020s it seems surprisingly easy to tell non-human actors from human actors, at least in this medium. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You’d think they’d have gotten better at it by now. And maybe they have, if by they we mean someone out there somewhere. But those unethical or foolish enough to spam-dump people by the millions are probably not the sharpest people around. It’s the same reason those Nigerian prince emails always end up obvious by some tell or other, sloppy wording, misspellings, something off, even before the part where they say the next step is to wire cash a.s.a.p. …<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This website was getting lots of spam for a while (which I first mentioned back in spring 2020). It became much less so after some skillful behind-the-scenes changes by my generous host J. W now of “Rockpit, Alaska.” Without which this place looked truly abandoned, the quantity and quality of the spam as tumbleweeds in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2086\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}