Saturday, December 8, 2012

Those poor bots, man

Last week, for the first time ever, a spam comment made its way past the Blogger filters. First time in eighteen months. Like everyone, I get email notifications when someone comments, so I deleted it immediately... But it started me thinking.

These bots that troll the blogosphere, leaving comments with links to such trust-inspiring sites as cheap cigarettes online UK, or speed up computer--I know they're bots, I know there's no actual person typing these comments over and over. Or maybe there is; I'm sadly (perhaps happily) un-versed in how spam works. Still, even if they're bots, I feel kind of sorry for them. Trolling, trolling, trolling... All that effort going to waste, because Blogger's spam filter catches them more often than not.

Makes me want to cry.


Image credit:
Shayn Amber / platypusart.com
Bots have no feelings, you say. Well, how do you know? There's still people that believe animals have no feelings, right? And you know better. (You do know better, don't you?) Who's to say bots aren't getting their little algorithm hearts crushed every time their spammy comments get deleted and trashed? I mean, they probably didn't choose an existence devoted to luring innocents to buy youtube views. Would you? No, of course not. But these bots--they never got a choice.

The poor, poor bots. Exploitation, that's what it is. Slavery. And it's becoming more pathetic by the blog post. They're so bereft of acceptance that they've begun to have imaginary dialogue with us.


It's impressive that you are getting thoughts from this paragraph as well as from our dialogue made at this time.

This one... Gosh, my heart aches. Dialogue. Aww. And Blogger marks this as spam. Heart of coldest steel, I tell you.

Then there's the one that admits, quite blatantly, to being forced to pretend emotions:

i am genuinely happy to read everything at one place.

Accuse me of reading too much into this, but I stand by my original assessment: the genuinely is a Freudian slip. The bot is admitting he/she is often--perhaps always has been! what tragedy!--fake happy. Like a sex slave in a pasha's harem, he/she is forced to pretend happiness.

Horrible, I know. And what about the content bit? Now, I'm inordinately proud of my blog, and I know I tend to meander, go off on irrelevant tangents, etc., but to qualify the content here as everything... Well. What poverty of reading material must this poor bot have been subjected to in order to consider my off-topic musings everything.

Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly flattered by their esteem. Who can resist a bot that begs:

The posts are too brief for novices. May you please extend them a bit from next time?

Blogger, that's who. SPAM, wham, no thanks necessary, bot ma'am.

Awww. The poor, poor bot!

Is it any wonder that their whipped brains have deteriorated to the point of nonsensical syntax? Are you even surprised they can't string two words together properly?

When someone writes an article he/she retains the idea of a user in his/her brain that how a user can be aware of it.

Huh?

It's pretty worth enough for me.

Pretty--what?

I am also zealous of getting familiarity.

Zealous, he writes. Zealous. Jeez.

The poor, poor bots.


3 comments :

  1. They should totally form a union. By Dec 21th.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This reminds me of a short story I read recently that you might like. It was called "The Church of Accelerated Redemption" and was all about bot consciousness. It was written by Gareth L. Powell & Aliette de Bodard and published in the Shine anthology, and I'm not sure if it's appeared anywhere else. You'd probably find it worth checking out!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Guilie, I laughed so hard and wished I'd written such a great post! :) And Vero, I love your suggestion that they form a union. Or at least a support group - with telemarketers, perhaps?

    ReplyDelete

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