Patch says:

Some time ago, the comment spam on this blog primarily comprised impressive walls of links, interspersed with text (usually in Russian, for whatever reason).  Obvious and easy to moderate — the sheer volume was the main headache — the strategy probably worked just fine for sneaking spammy links into blogs without basic filters in place.

More recently, the spam comments have changed in tone, tenor, and language.  Nowadays, I get brief messages, in my native tongue, along the lines of “I really like your writing, you should do this professionally.”  Such comments always make me pause for a fraction of a moment, as the flattery appreciating gears in my brain get tickled, before more rational centers say “nah, it’s just a spammer, see the spammy links next to their name?  (Also, your writing sucks).”  And I click “spam”, and the comment is gone from my sight.

Automated empty flattery.  It’s actually kind of awesome, kind of beautiful.  What other little bits of humanity can we chop up and feed through a computer in this way?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Misc. Monday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.