Thursday, September 07, 2006
(1:37 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Further Thoughts on Spam
As you know, this isn't a particularly comment-heavy site. I do think we have decent comment sections, but this isn't Unfogged by any stretch of the imagination. Still, being a blogger and having the attendant neuroses, I still start to feel like a worthless person if people aren't leaving comments pretty consistently throughout the day.Lately, that hasn't been as much of a problem, because I'm getting more and more spam comments every hour. It's gotten to the point where I am marking twenty or thirty comments as spam every morning, and when I refresh after finishing, another one or two spam comments have appeared. In fact, some days I think to myself, "Man, I suck -- no one but spammers are visiting my site."
Then I thought, "Wait -- spammers are visiting my site. Perhaps this is pushing up my SiteMeter stats." If spambots really do count as visitors, that would be artificially inflating my visit counts -- which I don't mind, because I just like to see bigger numbers when I check the thing. (Getting a link from Bitch PhD, then from a few other sites based on Bitch's recommendation, has doubled traffic in the last week, and that makes me happy.)
I also thought that maybe that would result in a higher Ecosystem rating, but then it occurred to me that bigger sites would of course have more spam, and perhaps even exponentially more spam -- meaning that the rich would get even richer, on the backs of the spambots.
In any case, this is all basically academic. I can't make money off the site aside from begging for donations, because Ben Wolfson got me kicked off of Google Adsense. Growing the actual audience of the site seems like more trouble than it's worth -- I'm happy with the regulars right now. We've had a pretty steady group hanging around here for the last year or more, and that's a more meaningful accomplishment than achieving some kind of generic mass appeal.
Still, I wouldn't mind having a thousand-visit day. (Last week we hit over 900 when Bitch's post was still relatively fresh and the blog "Making Light," which is apparently very popular, also linked to the same post.)
This has been a shit and garbage post.
