I’m not really writing any of these entries expecting to get commentary. I don’t think I have any commentary displayed, but that doesn’t stop people from submitting them.
Most are the obvious SPAM that anyone who has had a public-facing website with feedback/commentary functionality have seen: ads for services and websites, often in foreign languages, with no relevance to the posting. In early days, it was all about getting keywords and/or links onto as many websites to game the Google PageRank algorithm as possible. I suspect there were always some trying to do more creative methods, but as I was reviewing and deleting these from WordPress I saw some which made me question 1) whether they were SPAM and 2) what the motivation was.
I am pretty sure they are SPAM. While you’ll see they seem positive, engaging, and not marred by the usual elements of SPAM, they are just so vague as to leave in doubt they have any real relevance to the postings. One could imagine either a well-crafted and well-stocked inventory of these to randomly post as commentary wherever the SPAMmer can, or that someone has written a clever AI to read the posts and then generate vague commentary.
But why? This is less clear. In most cases of SPAM or scams like this, I would expect them to want to engage with me and lead me to wherever their end goal is. As I do with random calls, I just respond very slowly and without enthusiasm. I bore them into either giving up or showing their hand without having led me far enough into their scheme. This has worked pretty well with calls to the point where I had friends receive a similar scam call and in their case the caller got to the “ask” whereas they never got there with me.
Though I am not planning on engaging or approving any of these as commentary on my posts, I am including some in this post as I admire the ego-boosting aspects of their creation. Bravo bot!
“It is truly a great and helpful piece of information. I am satisfied that you shared this helpful information with us. Please keep us informed like this. Thanks for sharing.”
“What i do not realize is in fact how you are no longer really a lot more well-appreciated than you may be now. You are very intelligent. You already know therefore considerably in terms of this matter, made me individually believe it from numerous varied angles. It’s like men and women are not interested unless it’s something to accomplish with Girl gaga! Your individual stuffs great. All the time handle it up!”
“Can I simply say what a reduction to search out somebody who truly knows what theyre talking about on the internet. You undoubtedly know learn how to deliver an issue to gentle and make it important. Extra individuals must learn this and understand this aspect of the story. I cant imagine youre not more common since you undoubtedly have the gift.”
Follow up: When I used Google’s Gemini to create the image for this post, they asked me if I wanted to use their new feature that allows me to turn it into an animation. Why not?
Well, it was a little creepier than I expected: