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Remember PayPerPost and Paid Posting Tools? The bad idea that refuses to die? Yet another idiot (this time it’s twenty-year-old entrepreneur Jon Waraas) has come up with a scheme to make a stable business out of peddling blog comment spam to advertisers. He’s calling it Buy Blog Comments. To quote Josh Catone:
Buy Blog Comments charges $.20 per comment for what they say are “quality blog comments.” To write truly quality blog comments that won’t be flagged by site owners as spam like the site promises one would have to find related blog posts, read them, and compose thoughtful, on-topic replies that subtly weave in a marketing message with a link that is worthwhile to readers. If we can assume that takes at least 10 minutes per comment, then this site is paying its writers probably less than a $1/hour. That makes me skeptical that the site could deliver on its promise of comments that don’t look like spam. But I’ll let the site speak for itself and you can judge the “quality.”He then quotes a representative sample of Jon Waraas’s own prose:
We dont use people who cant even speak english. It is important to have well written blog comments so that they wont get deleted by the blogger. All of our trained staff are currently from the USA and Canada and speak english very well.Right.
I expect Waraas will run into the same problem encountered by all the other badguy-wannabe comment spam marketers: the excessively high per-comment cost of hiring writers who can turn out believable comment spam. Writers are cheap, but advertisers are cheaper. I don’t look for stealth comment spam to be a real problem until there’s a large pool of people in underdeveloped countries who can write undetectable standard English, but not get a better-paying job doing something else.
What I find funny about the comment-spam marketing business is that it would work much better as a “make money fast” scam. Check out my previous post about commercial comment spam to see a long but incomplete list of startups that’ve had the exact same bad idea as Mr. Waraas.
Obviously, the way to make money is not to run a business that commissions writers to hack out stealthy comment spam on behalf of clients’ marketing needs; it’s to sell the idea of starting up such a business, and let your hapless customers find out the hard way that hand-tailored comments of passable quality cost too much to be attractive to advertisers.
Come to think of it, the same is true of display sites (see also): they’re a bad idea that’s forever being reinvented and touted as the Next Big Thing, and they’re always miserable failures. The trick is not to run one; it’s to advertise that, for the low, low price of (mumblehundred) dollars, you’ll let your customers in on the secrets of running a display site. Given how often this unworkable idea gets reinvented, there’ve got to be suckers out there who’ll think it’s plausible.
me write engrish very good now. but mees want more moorah. :)
I suspect their "quality" comments are like the ones I junk daily on the work-related blogs I administer. You get them, too, I imagine: The ones that offer such penetrating insights as "This is a very good post. Exactly what I expected to see." Attached to a URL hawking the usual spammer junk.
I'll give them this much: They are, in fact, written in English.
I suspect that the promoters of scams of this sort are hoping to sign up a fair number of punters and then vanish with the loot after a month or two.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the spam that showed up in my mail today titled "work with Google on line"? My immediate reaction was "with != for and never will". (Of course I did not open it.)
Now I'm imagining something involving a hopped-up version of Eliza. Scan for keywords in the comment thread, frame them grammatically, put in a link that fits at least one of the keywords, fire off text.
Dang. I know how to do that. I could actually, honestly, do that. With my own hands, I could create a bot that would add comments into a thread that were indistinguishable from the "average" poster. The only part I'd need humans for would be captchas, and "free" porn on another domain name would take care of that.
It's a good thing for the world that I'm not as evil as I look. The Personalized Horoscope Lucky Lotto Number Calendar has got nothing on this.
One of Terry Pratchett's lines: "people who learned the language in a hurry to sell things to the natives."
I don’t look for stealth comment spam to be a real problem until there’s a large pool of people in underdeveloped countries who can write undetectable standard English
Ack! I think I just figured out the real purpose behind the "One Laptop Per Child" program....
Then there's a type of spam I first saw here on Making Light (likely done elsewhere, but I'm cutting down on blogs*).
Spam where the content is simply plagarized text from upthread in a very long thread.
Clever, because
1. The comment itself looks good, because the spammer doesn't have to write well, they just need to know how to cut and paste well.
2. The URL gets indexed as the commenter's name, so the nofollow is circumvented.
I note an example of this is still up at the Fanfic Force thread.
----------
* rrbilrts: Reading raw blogs is like reading the slushpile.
His page on "nofollow" claims that the nofollow tag "dose not work." Now, I know Patrick doesn't like it when I pick on people's spelling (nor does my extremely dyslexic husband), but if this fellow is touting his sweatshop's collective writing skills, um, well...
joann@4:
I actually do work for Google on line. But they don't use spam to recruit new employees.
Mary Dell #10:
One way I'm sure it's spam instead of legitimate stuff from wherever is that spam always, but always, has a misspelling somewhere in the from or subject header.
Another fun trend: Twitter Spam. I've been added at least twice recently (see here and here) by twits who are clearly using the same (presumably commercial) program to generate "hype" for their projects.
I would love to know if any of the folks actually using any of these services (whether Buy Blog Comments, the twits above, or the method that Kathryn describes at #9) actually get any positive value from these services, or if it's just a short-term cash cow for the middlemen like Waraas.
(Actually, I think I already know the answer to that one).
Janice E #11:
It wasn't that I didn't believe one could work *for* Google online, it was just noticing the difference between "for" and "with". The latter means "one uses google", not "one is employed by them". Gotta give them points for a neat balance on the fine line between deception and truth in advertising.
What drives me spare is the spamming of very old LJ comment threads; I get them on random chapters of fic, obituaries of famous and family, and word-usage rants, all at least three years old.
I mean: Why? Who's going to read the comment thread of a post I wrote the day Luna Leopold's obituary appeared in the NYT? A thread with fewer than thirty coments (including my replies to comments) the last of which was on the same day I made the original post? Are they testing the waters, to see if I read my comment notifications and delete spam within some reasonable period?
Or are they just that stupid?
JESR @ 15
I think they're just simply hijacking it for their own purposes - those legitimate-looking sites that phishers lure people to are frequently set up on disused websites where they think they're safe.
JESR #15: They're not stupid (as they're likely automated to begin with, so there's no "brain" involved). Rather, they're hoping to tag along with a search term that led to your LJ. So someone who searches for Luna Leopold (or more likely something else in the post) will come to your page, see the comments, and decide, "gee, as long as I'm here, I guess I really should follow this link and get my penis enlarged."
Much of spam is built around that mysterious "step 2" on the "steal underwear . . . profit" continuum.
I do recommend turning anonymous commenting on your LJ off if you haven't; it's cut down drastically on comment spam for me (that, or the search engines spambots use don't care for my posts).
TNH, PNH, JM and Avram,
and
Adam @13,
I think the method I mention does suck some googlejuice out of sites like ML.
A quick search finds that the top ten hits (out of 39) for "Offshire Saftwore Prudict Tistang" (my misemvowelling) shows BreckRid at #9.
#10 is the post at Making Light. #8 is spam at Ezra Klein.
If instead the search is "Offshire Saftwore Prudict," then BreckRid is #223 of 14,000 hits. Making Light is #233. Being in the 200s shows some juice: Forrester (research company) is there.
I vote causation based correlation.
Adam, since I have a couple of RL friends who are blogging-averse, and comment frequently on my journal, turning off anon commenting is cutting off my nose to spite my face in a big way.
But whomever is writing the algorithms that run the spambots is pretty inelegant, not to say cack handed.
JESR - I have my LJ set up to screen comments from anyone not on my friends list. Anonymous comments can still be posted, they're just not visible to anyone except the poster (and me) until I unscreen them. Would that work for you?
Lexica, that's one of the things I need to do, along with making sub-flist groups for things like S'cubie's only business, and, I hope, eventually, if I can get my cousins moving on it, a locked community for our family (since otherwise we mostly meet up at funerals, and that's getting depressing).
I'm still left wondering who these people think they're talking to, since, so far, there's been no links posted.
Lexica @20,
When you say "on my friends list," does that mean people that you've friended, or people who've friended you? Or both?
i.e. anyone can come along and say they're your friend, but do they get to read anything before you've looked at the You've Got a New Friend notification?
(my LJ and ljexperience are newborn)
Kathryn (#22): people you have friended. Anything that depends on "being on your friends list" means exactly that; your list.
For that matter, if someone friends you that you don't even want to have appear on your friend-of list, you can ban them from your LJ, which will also make them disappear.
More info in this FAQ.
JESR: I use screening for anon.
Since, for reasons I can guess, but not prove, I only have two posts which are prone to spamming (and one was being hit within days of writing, the other a few months later, but with depressing regularity), I ignore them.
Then, every so often I go in and clear out the dreck.
That also allows me to prevent flame-wars of anonymous people.
In a thread like this one where the idjit I was talking about (he has dreams of kidnapping child prostitutes from S. Asia, and spiriting them to an island off the southern tip of Chile, where he will train them to be "philosopher kings" and save the world from the men who have ruined it) decided to show up and defend himself from the scurrilous comments I made about the feasibility.
He took more exception to my actual thoughts.
Without the screening, it could have gotten ugly pretty fast; while I was away.
Kathryn (9), can you expand on that a bit? It sounds interesting, but I don't quite get what you're saying.
Mary Dell (10), he's got an interesting take on the efficacy of nofollow. On the one hand, he's got an entire page devoted to explaining why it doesn't actually matter. On the other hand, there's this bit from his How it Works? page:
When you order one of our packages, our blog specialists look through the huge database of no nofollow tag blogs and then pick only the blogs in your niche. ...Given his proposed line of business, you'd think he'd know whether nofollow matters.
TNH @25,
Three comments at the end of Fanfic Force are spam comments like this one.
The comment text looks real because it was real the first time it was posted far upthread.
My analysis @18 suggests that the spammer unfortunately gains a boost from the name link, because Google indexes names and URLs (although perhaps not email addresses. hmmm.*)
-----------
Fluorospherioides, a question:, if you've
1. switched from an email to an URL in your ML comments' Address box.
2. know what your googlejuice was before.
3. know what it is now.
How did it change?
Adam #17:So someone who searches for Luna Leopold (or more likely something else in the post) will come to your page, see the comments, and decide, "gee, as long as I'm here, I guess I really should follow this link and get my penis enlarged."
From the comment spam I get it seems like the spammers are using crude searches to decide which blogs to hit. My blog about women in science routinely gets comments touting cheap subscriptions to playboy and lonely 25-year-olds with web cams. Since my other blogs don't get that kind of spam, it seems likely that they are targeting any blogs that mention women, no matter how inappropriate for their product.
He says it better than I could:
In fact, most blogger will like the free comments to help with their with there community.. (sic, complete with double period)
Damn. I see what you mean. Igor squash like bugs.
This particular racket - selling unworkable, unscalable "systems" - is positively pre-Cambrian (in internet time). Remember when email spam first started becoming a problem, waaaaay back in 1994 or thenabouts? It always seemed that 90% of those early spam emails were advertisements for turnkey email marketing businesses. Make thousands from your home computer in your spare time through the power of spam marketing! Of course, if there was so much demand for email direct marketing, then somebody would be using it to advertise things other than email direct marketing services...
It's the high-tech equivalent of those ads you'd see in the back of maagzines, saying they'll tell you the secret to unlimited wealth if you send $5 to a PO Box. If you do, you get back a grainy photocopy saying "to make lots of money with no effort, just take out an ad in the back of a magazine offering to tell people the secret of wealth for $5..."
Kathryn from Sunnyvale, you are mighty -- but how did you ever manage to catch those?
FMGuru @ 30
There's another version, I understand: those sites with television ads about 'I made thousands working from home with my computer'.
One: most blog posts on any given subject aren't very different.
Two: this is even more true for comments.
Three: this is even more true for hostile comments.
Therefore, it is possible to deduce, based on the key words of the original post (which could be identified with some kind of filter, (I hand wave here)) the likely hostile comments it will receive.
These comments often bear only the slightest relationship to the actual post, and so could be pre-written and mass posted to various blogs. They would appear to be trollish, and you would lose some to mods deleting trolls, but quite a lot would survive, as, instead of falling under the `spam' category, they would appear to be sincere disagreements, and thus treated with a certain degree of respect.
Example:
Blogger A posts about the DoJ scandals. The standard wingnut response is ``Clinton did it too.'' This is pretty automatic; all you'd need is to identify the post as about the firings, and ``Clinton did it too'' would fit right in.
It's a half-way house between bespoke spam and generic nonsense.
If you were *very* good, you could match up blog posts as `about the same thing', and swap comments between them, and so get a pool of on-topic remarks without typing a word.
This does rely on the existence of a large mass of midlist blogs, all aproximately following the same things at the same time, and thus having quite a lot of indistinguishable conversations.
It breaks down for Making Light;
``I that in heill wes and gladnes
Am trublit now with great sicknes
My sicklie stait is no surprise:
IM IN UR BASE KILIN UR GUYZ.''* is not a very common topic, and nor is Les Indes Galantes. You'd get caught out no matter what if you didn't have a human (or a Turing Test capable AI, and if you have one of them, why are you wasting your time selling pr0n?) replying. But good enough is good enough.
*Really, just wanted an excuse to read through that thread again.
And the same thing on a retail basis:
Amazon's 'Mechanical Turk' service (named after the ancient scam of the chess playing 'automaton' that really had a human concealed inside) is a brokerage service which allows buyers and sellers of tiny amounts of humans-only work to trade. As a customer of Mechanical Turk I might, for instance take the job of looking at three automatically taken photographs and deciding which one is the clearest picture of 123 Main St. - for a fee of two or three cents.
It's an interesting idea, and every few months I have look to see what work's up there, though at the rates they offer I've never felt tempted to do any. Anyway, preamble over:
I looked at the site a while ago, and one of the 'jobs' offered was "Make a link from your site to my site, along with a favourable comment, and send me the link so I can verify it." for I think around 15 cents.
Amusing, evil, unlikely to change the world in a major way.
JESR @#15: The 'bots don't care how old the post is. My blog gets about 1 real comment a month (I'm an infrequent poster, so I ain't complaining) and the rest are all spam - so I hold everything for moderation. I knew I was asking for it when I started blogging about a medical condition and the various prescriptions I've tried! Drug spam galore.
Aside from that I get lots of "Hi, nice site, some good informations here!" spam. Unfortunately I'm using MT via Yahoo (therefore some weird OEMd version, I think) which doesn't make it easy to lock old threads.
Oh hai, he has a blurb on that "nofollow" page that is, predictably, from himself@his blog.
Here's his post defending the comment-buying business and explaining that, while unethical, it's not spam.
oh jeez, he says there's been "a lot of talk amongst the blogspear."
Janis E #11:
Google does use spam in recruiting. I know a number of people who've received it.
the blogspear
That one's not in my current Player's Handbook. Is it from Unearthed Arcana?
Blog.. spear. Ouch. Let alone the other errors all over that page.
So, it's okay to be unethical, but that is alright, because it isn't SPAM... uh-huh.
In a way, I'm impressed. The guy is twenty, apparently owns his own house and has his own business... sadly, that business is using tricks to exploit search engine optimisation. Which means, fake sites, spam blogs, fake blogposts all polluting up the internet.
Here's another to chill your blood: crowdsourcing, apparently. To be honest I don't use social media sites much; I find reading material based on following links as they ripple progressively further out from blogs I read anyway. This is pretty much another form of trying to make money by paying desperate humans to spam, and unlikely to be any more successful than the more direct method.
But it's the last line that scared me:
Do you see a particular presidential candidate on the front page more than others? Certainly that is not all our work, but we like to think we played a small part in starting it.
I doubt this guy (naming himself after a pirate from Ayn Rand, how sad can you get?) will actually get rich doing this, certainly none of the idiots who work for him will. But he's still polluting our discourse, and I think he could cause lasting harm before his bubble bursts.
There are times (and other events local to me are kick-starting my cynicism) when it seems that spam and astroturf, and all the other detritus of the net, are nothing special.
I just checked local jobs on the British government's own jobsearch site. No jobs that exactly fitted my search, but hey, don't worry, have a look at all these other jobs...
Jobs on the far side of the country.
Jobs without an employer's name given.
Jobs which are for a purpose so secret that nobody is to know what they are.
Somebody must be playing bureaucratic tickybox, and their idea of "local" is only valid if they're thinking in terms of astronomy.
We're living in a world where lies are the only useful vocabulary.
There are times (and other events local to me are kick-starting my cynicism) when it seems that spam and astroturf, and all the other detritus of the net, are nothing special.
I just checked local jobs on the British government's own jobsearch site. No jobs that exactly fitted my search, but hey, don't worry, have a look at all these other jobs...
Jobs on the far side of the country.
Jobs without an employer's name given.
Jobs which are for a purpose so secret that nobody is to know what they are.
Somebody must be playing bureaucratic tickybox, and their idea of "local" is only valid if they're thinking in terms of astronomy.
We're living in a world where lies are the only useful vocabulary.
One defense against this is to not have the blogosphere become a complete monoculture. As long as there are an unmanageably large number of moderation strategies and posting rules, it should be difficult for automated or semiautomated blog post spam to scale well.
More fundamentally, blog post spam just works differently. With email spam, I can subscribe to many services that try to block spam, and experiment with the algorithms until I find stuff that gets through the filters; when the spam is noticed, each reader must remove it himself. By contrast, I don't get to do endless experimentation on a targeted blog (as I spam the blog and get through, they're likely to change the rules) and only one person has to notice and kill the blog comment spam.
I expect we're going to see a lot of this in the next few years. This presidential election and the next one are going to teach us a great deal about all the nasty stuff that can be done to disrupt, shut down, spike, or steer online discussions.
Basic business modeling suggests that we don't really have to worry about the poor-people-who-speak english population -- if they can write decent comment spam they should be able to write blogs or build sites capable of hosting similarly profitable google ads. So they can cut out the middletwits.
Here's another one:
Nutshell of the article is that there's a company that will pay folks to Digg and Stumbleupon stories.
(Note: Link is to an article mentioning the company, not the company itself.)
I would like to try my hand at this:
----------------------------------------
Speaking of spam, have you guys heard about the new Monty Python boxed set. It contains all of the Flying Circus [link] episodes as well as the movies. I just got it last week, and I've been laughing my ass of since.
But speaking of payperpost, I agree that's a pretty messed up idea. I mean, I'm not opposed to making money on my blog, I could always use the extra cash, but it has to be honest. I'm thinking about checking out this program [link] though. They pay you to review products on their blog network and they are totally upfront about it. I've heard that you can make up to $500 a month. Not bad for writing about what you care about, I'd say.
By the way, have any of you heard about this service [link]. I'm kind of interested, but I don't want to be scammed. I've even loaded this program [link] to help protect myself from scammers.
I've also noticed in other places in this blog that many of you are interested in getting rid of bushes. I've tried this product [link] and it's worked out well for me. I don't mean to advertise, it's just a really good product I have to tell everyone that want to be rid of unwanted bushes and weeds about it.
------------------------------------
What do you think, did I earn my dollar? It only took 5 minutes, so I could make up to $12/hour just sitting at home, typing on my computer!
Seems pretty exhausting, if you ask me.
Kathryn, you're missing your chance here:
I just checked Google, and you already have the market in "Offshire Saftwore Prudict Tistang" completely cornered!
Now you just need to figure out what it is. Clearly it's something to do with prudes who have left their home Shire - possibly prudish hobbits, like the Sackville-Bagginses - but I'm puzzled about the saftwore and tistang. Once you've worked that part out, you just need to sit back and wait for the orders to roll in.
Something to distract Teresa. (Unless someone here has mentioned this in another thread?)
'Saftwore' and 'tistang' sound like herbs from an alternative universe (or, perhaps, from another earthlike planet.
I think of 'saftwore' as having broad, soft leaves. And 'tistang', clearly, is the basis of a stimulating tisane.
An otherly savory Florida Republican has taken this to the next level, and is providing blog comment trolls-for-hire to corporations and politicians.
ah, and then I clicked through Lenny's link.
Gurk.
Net even very well done.
Looks like the same one that was here a couple of days ago.
The site being behind the name and in the post says it all.
Now, David, you're being uncharitable.
Maybe the poster's parents were trying to be unusual. Then nominative determinism took over.
However, I've just performed a quick deed poll on poor Mr Enlargement. Hopefully his career will continue to follow his name!
Maybe it was a typo and his name really is Denis Enlargement.
I wonder if Mr. Enlargement came over here because he misread the title's peddling as something else, thus leading him to piddling away an opportunity to introduce himself to this neighborhood.
Serge #66:
And that put me in mind of:
Où est la très sage Héloise,
Pour qui chastré fut et puis moyne
Pierre Esbaillart à Sainct-Denis?
Pour son amour eut cest essoyne.
Semblablement, où est la royne
Qui commanda que Buridan
Fust gecté en ung sac en Seine?
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?
And where, indeed, are the snows of yesterday?
Fragano @ 68.... where, indeed, are the snows of yesterday?
"I'm melting... melting... what a world!"
And let's forget what Frank Zappa said about eating snow.
[Noun] enlargement products at guaranteed cheap price!
[noun] enlargement pills, [noun] enlargement patches, [noun] enlargement devices, [noun] enlargement exercises, [noun] enlargement gel, and [noun] enlargement treatments with FDA approroved guaranteed.
[posted from 202.143.112.106]
I think this spam is about penises.
I've got a theory
It could be penii
Some sentient penii
No, something isn't right here.
Welcome to Making Light, penis. Do you write poetry?
A J Luxton @ 72... something isn't right here
...but it's a small problem.
If you to have more fun with Venus
You don't need a larger penis
nor toys, ploys and noise
(they only serve to annoy)
But rather to know where her "bean" is.
A.J. Luxton: The plural of penis is penes (the things one learns when breeding snakes)
Terry...I have to say, next time I quote you I'm going to say "As military interrogator, chef, and snake breeder Terry Karney once said..."
Have you considered changing your name to Buckaroo Banzai?
Terry beareth away the palm, proving with his verse that the pen is mightier than the spam.
You guys do make it very difficult to actually delete spam sometimes. And don't even try to pretend you're sorry.
abi @ 77... Oh, but I am sorry. Constrictedly contrite, in fact. (And you'll notice I made no bad joke about the pen's might, tempted as I was.)
abi: You tell us to make poetry, and I have seen you dissect spam in verse, so no, I ain't sorry at all.
Doggerel counts. I should have spent more time on it, (have should be want, noise should be something else), but it ain't rocket science, and practice makes better.
Acomplia [can't possibly be a worthwhile drug, if they're having to advertise it via spam].
IP address: 202.143.112.106
Acomplia [can't possibly be a worthwhile drug, if they're having to advertise it via spam].
IP address: 119.30.124.141
Natural Hairballs - We Care Your Health [but not your syntax] blah blah blah blah blah www.naturalhairballs.com
IP address: 116.71.33.132
Sexual health and hair care?
Sign me up!
Sounds like organic growth to me... ;)
IP address: 194.246.124.67
IP address: 200.104.250.91
84, 86, 88, 91, 92
Lee, Xeger, Serge, Joel, P J Evans: Thank you! May today have been the best day of their lives.
Maybe it's a tracking code...?