Values

People have completely reverted to a self serving, might is right mentality. This is very evident when you look at the idea of spam. Spammers of today force us to protect ourselves so heavily that we can no longer effectively accomplish our goals. Here’s a couple of examples.

I have a photo-gallery on my site with my favourite pictures. I allow comments because that way family can enjoy the photos and open a discussion on each one. This is to my way of thinking a great technology. The problem is that spammers come in and leave garbage comments trying to sell stuff. These comments naturally have nothing to do with the photo that they left it under. I had one spam that actually said, “Nice photo, …” and then left a plethora of links to medical sites including back of the truck Viagra sales. Now, in this scenario I can definitely set the site up to allow comments only from registered users, and then restrict the users and that would not impede me too much.

The other example is my opinions blogs. In that case, I don’t really want to require users to login because that will make it harder to get responses from the general public. I want people to leave comments on my opinions, but again, I don’t really care where I can get Viagra from. What am I supposed to do? If I force people to login to leave comments, then I will also have to filter who can be a user. How am I supposed to know which strangers are spammers and which aren’t? I guess that forcing that issue can make it a bit more difficult for spammers especially if they are automating their spamming. In the example above, it was obvious that some do it by hand since they could comment on the picture.

The real question is, why do they do it? People have discovered that occasionally a sucker will bite. Let’s say that 0.01% take the bait and follow these links and buy something. If they expose their ads to one million people, then that translates into 100 sales. That’s pretty good, so now the spammer says, if get 100 in a million, then I will hit 10 million, or 100 million and get even more sales. There’s big money there. In fact, I see the same thing from banks trying to sell me credit cards.

So one would be inclined to say that even though the rest are annoyed by the spam, the buyers are getting useful stuff. Bite your tongue. Lots of these buyers do not know how to ignore that stuff, and then get stuck. It is quite obvious that these spammers are only thinking about how much money they might make. They do not consider how annoyed they make millions of people every day. They also do not consider that they are not the only spammers out there. I get hundreds of email spams every single day. I don’t read a single one of them. I have a spam catcher that does a pretty good job, so only a handful or two per week make it through. I don’t even check to see if the email in the spam catcher might not be spam. If it isn’t then too bad. This has it’s downsides. I actually do miss legitimate emails because of this, but what can I do?

How do we deal with this. There are supposed to be laws against this kind of thing, but they are unenforceable. Vigilantism is illegal, so if you have the means to shut a spammer down, you will be punished for it. This subject leaves me too frustrated to actually be able to productively come up with a solution. Maybe you have one.