I love the comment spam I get here. For one thing, There’s a strange, enjoyable beat poetry aspect to the auto-generated text that tries so hard to be friendly, everyday real people making friendly conversation; the enthusiastic — always stunningly, inhumanly, enthusiastic — tenor that almost vibrates off the screen with anxious need and awkward, unlikely emphasis in the wrong places. “Oh wow I’m so GLAD I found your site what you guys do is THE BEST” with no punctuation or breath to be found.
The fact that, for the most part, spam comments are so complimentary is a pleasure to me. This site is, as I’ve said before, something I do for myself first and foremost, but I like imagining people who create a site seeking an external validation they’re not getting anywhere else in their life receiving any number of spam comments that say things like, “you guys are the best at what you do,” or some variation, and it actually making them feel better. The very notion of confidence building through automation is appealing, even if it’s an accidental by-product or more cynical ambitions.
Not every spam comment is complementary, of course; some are faux-helpful, telling me that I can reach more readers if only I buy this particular product, or sign up for this special SEO service, or something similar. I feel almost guilty when I receive these ones. It’s not that I recognize them for the phishing schemes that they so clearly are, because, well, I’m not stupid. But I feel bad because I don’t want to reach more readers or grow my audience or increase my search rankings; that kind of thing is the antithesis of what I want from this site, and I feel as if I’ve wasted the auto-generated spam’s time as a result. I’m sure there are others who need to read that untrustworthy offer far more than me, little bot. I’m sorry.
I get a curiously high volume of spam comments here, considering I’m off in the internet back woods, off by myself and typing away quietly, and the spam filter catches them all. But I look through them all anyway, enjoying their nonsense as if they’re genuine correspondents from an alternate reality of bullshit. I’d miss them, if they were to disappear entirely.