This is a story about empires...
Spammer used to have a simple definition: somebody who sends out millions of unsolicited emails. Now, the term has been somewhat corrupted to mean anybody who threatens to take eyeballs away from your little fiefdom.
Yes, you managed to install phpBB and get a discussion forum going, or maybe you moderate a subreddit. Well done. Gold star.
Everybody on the fucking Internet is competing for a bit of eyeball time. A personal blogger sharing their shit is no more of a spammer than yet another fucking subreddit or discussion forum. One Twitter user is indistinguishable from another. Everybody is just churning shit out into the ether, hoping to be heard, and hoping to engage in discussion.
When you examine the motive of people who cry "spammer" at every opportunity, you'll see that it's much akin to religious thought leaders who say you can't believe in any other gods apart from theirs. The whole point is to lock people into your little cult.
The internet is fair fucking game. If somebody finds more interesting content elsewhere, anybody who cries "spammer" to try and prevent people from leaving the little walled garden they have created, is just an absolute empire building idiot. Content is king.
For sure, bots that create links to stuff to try and drive up advert impressions and clickthroughs are the scourge of the earth, but all content creators are equals. In fact, the unpaid blogger is more likely to churn out quality content than the paid clickbaiter and the guardians of the forums, whose job it is to try and keep people marooned on the tiny islands in the sea of quality content.
The spam that isn't spam is "worthless noise" until somebody stumbles on it and decides it has value. All anybody can do is create high quality content and hope it one day gets discovered. Yes, it's spam and "noise" until a sufficient quantity of people engage with it, but that doesn't mean it's garbage... it's as equally valid as anybody else's contribution.
This is the great meritocracy of the Internet. Anybody can self-publish, and people aren't subject to the gatekeepers who make sure that only their chums make it into print.
Dance like nobody's watching? Yes. And also write like nobody's reading, and don't let anybody tell you you're a spammer.
In a way, the vast pools of users on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit are somewhat contrary to the ethos of the Internet. Instead of each maintaining our own websites with our own content, we have given way to the era of the moderator and the administrator... little Hitlers who preside over their domains, cultivating their power base but contributing nothing of value.
It's really hard to get heard on the World Wide Web, but content is king and high quality content will always prevail over banal commercial tripe.
Yes, there's a war on ordinary netizens, with them being told that their content is boring and nobody cares. "Stop blogging and shut up. Nobody cares" people are told, with their dismal visitor numbers, while meanwhile some clickbait bullshit is being viewed millions of times.
Do not be dissuaded, I say. Through perseverance, the crap that only exists to capture our eyeballs for long enough to glance at an advert, will be the stuff that gets condemned to the dustbin of history, as the true spam.
Tags: #socialmedia #writing