I've been getting a shitload of spam comments on my Oberlin Blogs, uh, blog recently. Some of them are surprisingly nice:
That was remarkable post. I like to read articles that are edifying for
they enriched my mind with different knowledge that makes me a better
person. These articles especially about recent events, technologies,
news, tips and technical skills are the topics that I adore. Keep it up
and more power to your website. I look forward for your next article.I
am Jenny, a college girl and I like this article and it will be posted
on [redacted].
How nice! Thank you, Jenny. Then again, it seems that this post doesn't seem to have any bearing whatsoever on my post. Tyler Cowan seems to have better luck:
Your ideas on signalling are always interesting and informative….but, you focus a lot on signalling to others…..the more fascinating aspect is the signalling that we do to ourselves…..and why.
I deleted the comment anyway, to prove to myself I am tough and that I abide by the "no spam" rules. Behind it was a link to a German site selling computer products.
I assume that above comment was written by a human being. A' la Turing, I wonder when the average quality of spam comment will exceed the average quality of a non-spam comment. For many blogs (not MR), we're already there. Can you imagine blogs competing to capture greater and greater quantities of spam, as a way of "paying" for good comments? Or how about captchas which only let through spammers and discriminate against most others?
The real import of spam comments is best illustrated by Henry at Crooked Timber:
There’s a quasi-serious point buried in there, which is that the Internets, and the possibilities it offers to non-regular TV watchers like me to retrieve the information that we are interested in and no more can lead to deficits in certain kinds of common cultural knowledge. Not the kinds of civic knowledge that Cass Sunstein etc care about – but celebrity gossip, junky pop culture etc.1 Targeted advertising – to the extent that it actually works – is obviously no solution. But spam, designed as it is to cater to the lowest and broadest of tastes actually provides me with significant information that I probably wouldn’t pick up otherwise. Not that it makes spam trawling worthwhile or anything, but at least it gives me some benefit.
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