Thu 20 Mar 2008
The internet will never be free of spam and shilling and astroturfers — human nature plus a profit motive is a pretty resilient thing — but are we past the worst of it, or are we just in the eye of the storm?
Are things going to get worse? What ground do you see the spammers making? Or are the hard problems solved and it’s all going to get better from here — gmail’s apt handling of email spam-filtering as a promising sign for the future?
Posted by Josh Millard3 answers so far!
Okay, let's hear it.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Spam will never stop. In order to be immensely financially profitable, it relies upon a fantastically small percentage of people making purchases from a net spread nearly-Earthwide. Since there will always be a fantastically small percentage of people who are dumbf—k enough to purchase products advertised by spam, spam will always be profitable. The only way to stop this is to introduce new and extremely large costs — and costs that are automatically incurred anywhere, in any nationality that spam is produced — to make it unprofitable. Government regulation will not work, since spammers merely migrate servers and/or residences to locales where it is not illegal.
I love my Gmail spamfilter. I’ve been using the internets since er, Tymnet in 1987 and well, before spam, there was (paper) junk mail and TV commercials. Before that there was snakeoil. A fool and his money are soon parted, as they say, so if one wants to buy spam instead of watching Monty Python, that is their business. Heck, I even remember days before the Do Not Call List. If someone called, you could do stuff like lead them on, or maybe blow a loud whistle into the phone.
If they find a way to get around my spamfilter, I will do what I did in the old AOL days: click, delete, wash, repeat.
I don’t accept the premise of things being bad or even worse in the first place.
yesterday an offer to increase the size of my testicles to that of watermelons reached me. all with just one pill.
I think that’s awesome. somewhere a writer sits hunkered over a computer coming up with lines just to entertain my imagination. if the late-night talkshows had creative staffs half this good, the internet would be dead after six pm just like cnbc is.