Naivete

We Do Not Get It
The Daily Growler lately has been getting those sweet comments, like by the friendly "Anonymous," or the charming "Lana," who says she has an artist site and would like me to link to it, and a whole bunch of other glittering sweet comments like "Love your writing, and would really appreciate your linking to my ..." Tons of this stuff. And we know exactly what it is; we aren't that naive. We know it's the irritating asshole comment spammers trying to use us to move up in the search rankings. We toss these in the "Spam" bin, but we feel so stupid about not understanding how to technically stop comment spamming and there are plenty of ways but technically what these dudes are talking about just flows over our heads. Like Moveable Type. We just can't figure it out. Here is an interesting "supposed" interview with a link spammer from the UK's Register:

www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/31/link_spamer_interview/

We mean, everything is so god-damn commercialized; even The Daily Growler. Hell, give us your money--we'll give you a mention. We're out of the world of advertising; we know how far a good lie goes in hustling bucks off the gullible, and all of us are "the gullible," including even the most brilliant of us, who we all assume is thegrowlingwolf. We know he gets taken all the time; like ask him about that DVD recorder he bought on eBay for $135.

We are all easily scammed. Most of what we spend our money on is a scam. When we buy a new car, for instance, we're not getting anything like what the commercials blabber and brag about. We are actually buying a vehicle designed to put us at risk--like an SUV being built using a truck chasis, a much cheaper chasis than the one you should use on a real passenger car. A truck chasis sits up high and isn't that good a balancer; therefore, you have SUVs rolling all over the ditches of the world, tumbling over, or going into tailspins at any given moment. The other stuff we spend our money on, even the toothpaste or mouthwashes we buy, we buy on the basis of their commercial appeal, their brand impression on us.

So everything we do, even writing blogs, trying to get the common man's message out, has to be commercialized. If the comment spammer interviewed in the Register is real and really is knocking down seven figures from pushing pills, porn, and gambling, then, hell yeah; we could pull in seven figures using this blog for our own gain, F these canned spammers.

So the comment spammers are starting to fall in love with The Daily Growler. We are at a loss as to how to handle it. We assume we're supposed to leave it up to Google to figure out how to stop them. We do know of a blogger who had to totally reconstruct his site recently due to comment spammers flooding his comments all the way back to the beginning of his blog, to the tune of thousands. We fortunately so far have only 10 or so who are bugging us. We assume this is pure Capitalist enterprise; could we say these are the old line telemarketers simply becoming Internet savvy? Hey, you pricks, join the NRA, buy a .350 magnum and blow yer brains out; oh, I forgot, the purpose of the NRA is to legalize you blowing someone else's brains out. Such insane logic, even the logic of you comment spammers.

thestaff
for The Daily Growler