Comments on: Musings of a Metafilter Spammer

Musings of a Metafilter Spammer

Effigy2000 — Tue, 27 May 2008 11:46:51 -0800

Anybody who visits Metafilter regularly knows the drill. Someone signs up for the singular purpose of spamming the Metafilter frontpage, makes their mandatory three or four throwaway comments before being able to do so and is then beaten with the banhammer by our ever diligent moderators. By their very nature, these throwaway comments aren't the most significant contributions ever to be posted to Metafilter... until now! My new blog, 'Musings of a Metafilter Spammer' compiles the thoughts of each spammer in one single place, so you can read such thoughtful musings as "Nice!", "Wonder where I can get one?" and "Wow" before their posting rights (and their account) were forever deleted. And in doing so you'll get to laugh at the sheer simplicity of some of these asinine comments, and maybe stumble across some of the otherwise decent threads they used to make them in. A longer term goal is to use tags to document what these spammers are linking too, giving us a picture of what motivates someone to waste their $5 in a futile attempt at spamming one of the best communities on the internet.

By: [@I][:+:][@I]

[@I][:+:][@I] — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:15:03 -0800

Please visit my blog, where I talk about how this is good!

By: brownpau

brownpau — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:24:22 -0800

wow! nice!

By: mumkin

mumkin — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:05:26 -0800

I've been thinking something like this should be built, and then you did it. Why aren't you linking to the deleted thread that brought down the banhammer, however? It seems like worthwhile context.

By: iconomy

iconomy — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:08:01 -0800

This is brilliant. My favorite comment so far is "It begins".

By: Effigy2000

Effigy2000 — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:44:10 -0800

"Why aren't you linking to the deleted thread that brought down the banhammer, however? It seems like worthwhile context."
posted by mumkin at 8:05 AM on May 28

Because the Deleted Thread blog already does that very well, and I don't want to tread on any toes. Plus I don't think the spammers need another link to their wares somewhere on the web.

By: cjorgensen

cjorgensen — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:12:58 -0800

"A longer term goal is to use tags to document what these spammers are linking too, giving us a picture of what motivates someone to waste their $5 in a futile attempt at spamming one of the best communities on the internet."

Umm, let me field this one. Because $5 isn't really that much cash for even the smallest marketing budget. And I'm just guessing the attempts haven't always been futile.

By: cortex

cortex — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:17:07 -0800

Because the Deleted Thread blog already does that very well, and I don't want to tread on any toes. Plus I don't think the spammers need another link to their wares somewhere on the web.

You could always get synergistic and crap and link to the Deleted Thread entry. While I remember these pretty clearly, I'm kind of a weirdo in that I look at basically every deletion—it struck me while reading that having the context from puke & cry's blog or the direct link will probably sense-make these things a little more for readers. Not required or anything, but it does seem useful.

By: Effigy2000

Effigy2000 — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:38:51 -0800

Yeah actually, that could work. Thanks cortex! I could put an entry at the end of each post like [Deleted Thread] which links to puke&cry's entry for each individual spammers grisly end. I'll do that with future postings.

By: wendell

wendell — Tue, 27 May 2008 19:02:10 -0800

Is the Worst of MetaFilter spawning sites far faster than the Best of MetaFilter? It's like the first five minutes of "Idiocracy". (I could link to it on YouTube, but if you don't know it, you really don't need to)

By: never used baby shoes

never used baby shoes — Tue, 27 May 2008 19:56:58 -0800

Effigy2000: documenting the SEO war from the MetaFilter Front Lines. Maybe you can get embedded with the mods?

I think that this is rather interesting, and I like cortex's suggestion - in fact, I was going to make the same one.

By: drea

drea — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:39:53 -0800

Please, Sir Math Owie!

This is a goldmine.

By: Effigy2000

Effigy2000 — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:17:17 -0800

What's more amusing is how the spammers have started talking back of late! I was just looking through some of the older posts on 'Musings' the other night and found that two spammers had responded to the posts in which I discussed their spammy posts. I thought their responses were pretty amusing, and thought you might think so as well.

Here's the links.

I find it amusing that both of them said they didn't read Metafilter's terms and conditions when spamming the site, even though it says it right there when you make your post and, if I recall correctly, says it when you sign up too.

Thanks for all your kind words and your votes, people! I'm glad people are getting some enjoyment out of the site.