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I forgot to add the corollary. Much like computers will soon be able to solve CAPTCHAs better than people, automated spamming systems will eventually be able to
by briansmith 18y ago
I forgot to add the corollary. Much like computers will soon be able to solve CAPTCHAs better than people, automated spamming systems will eventually be able to generate comments that are as good or better than human-submitted comments. In other words, we can expect comments that are generated by spammers to eventually become valuable enough that we want to retain them instead of filtering them away. That isn't the reality today but it could be soon.
You might have a discussion in your blog's comments and then realize that everybody in the conversation is a robot except you. And you will learn something from those robots and/or lose an argument with them, when they get really good.
Eventually, you will be able to post a rough draft of your blog post, and the spam robots will start up a good conversation about it in the comments. Then, based on their feedback, you can revise it into the final draft (if the robots haven't already given you a link to a blog post that refuted your point or made it better than you can).
As a final step, we might notice that not only are the best comments are written by spam robots, but the best blogs are spam blogs too. Right now, people are blogging-for-adsense manually; in the future, Google will be able to blog-for-adsense itself, cutting out the authors.
Today, if a site wants its user-generated content (comments in this case) to retain its value, it needs to start filtering out the low-value content, regardless of whether it was generated by a spammer or a well-intentioned user. For example, If I add a comment to your blog "Great blog post!" on your blog, you should probably delete it, even if you know I am not a spammer. Unfortunately, if you do that, legitimate users who see their complimentary comments get deleted might react negatively (e.g. stop commenting or complain loudly, generating even worse comments). So, we can see that the spammers who are generating low-value comments already have the ability to drive away your valuable commentators if those commentators occasionally submit low-value comments.
- thepanister 18y agoThis looks so scary. we can expect comments that are generated by spammers to eventually become valuable enough that we want to retain them instead of filtering them away What is the point? Why spammers would submit a valuable comment? Just to be kind of a door for them to enter through later, and nobody will think it's a spam?
- briansmith 18y agoWhen you submit a comment to a blog, you usually get to include a link to a website along with the comment. Usually the commentator's name is linked to that website in the resulting comment page. If my spam comment is good, a very small number of people will click my username and go to the site I choose. The more comments I get published, the more clicks I get on my link. If that is a spam link, I get paid for every one of those clicks. Or, a spammer might generate some good comments just to get the comment classifier to mis-classify a blatantly spammy comment that will be submitted later.
- thepanister 18y agoYou are more than a genius! Do you have any publications or a blog? I am very interested in learning more from you... you look like a scientist! EDIT: But there is a point here that you did not really mention! You assumed that spammers will be smarter, but spam filters will still stupid? Don't you think that as spammers build a smarter bots, the spam-fighters will build a smarter spam filters?
- briansmith 18y agoSee, this was a very nice demonstration. How am I supposed to tell if thepanister is a robot or not? Based on the content of this message it could go either way.
- thepanister 18y agoLOOOL But I edited it to look a man-made. :) Please re-read it again.
- briansmith 18y agoI have been meaning to make a blog but all my computing time has been spent building some software that I will release soon. Email me (brian@briansmith.org) and I will send you a link when it is ready. Include what kind of phone you have (e.g. Nokia 1100, Android) and I will send you a free copy of the software if it works on your phone. (This is an open offer to anybody: if you are the first person with your model of phone to email me, I will give you a free license if/when it works on your phone. Also notice how spammy this comment is.)