Automated Content, Article Spinners and Other Artificial Things — I'm Not Brave Enough!

I like Sunday mornings because pretty much everyone in the house sleeps in and things are quiet. I tend to be (mostly) a "morning person" whose brain functions best between my first cup of coffee and about lunchtime.

These days, I spend more time with Steemit in the morning than with my "other" blogs. To me, this is still very much a "community" foremost, as well as a blogging venue. 

In this morning's rounds, I decided to do something new: I went to the "SteemBotTracker" and spent a while looking at the type of content Steemit users are paying to upvote.

There's so much controversy over these bid bots and how "garbage is upvoted to trending" and on and on... but many of those voices are based on hearsay and "me too" piling-on, rather than direct observation. 

Four Major Groups?

My brief journey suggested four primary groups of users:

First, pretty well created posts — by newcomers and old-comers alike — that someone decides WILL go to Trending, no matter what. So they throw hundreds of dollars at numerous bots to get their upvote total up in the $500+ range.

Second, established "senior" Steemians who use bidbots to add another $20-$50 to a post that's already organically earning as much as $100. Often, they don't buy a vote till several days into the life of the post.

Third, lots and lots of mostly new users who pay to use bots to take pretty "marginal" content from being rewarded less than a dollar with a tiny number of "organic" upvotes, to being rewarded as much as perhaps $50.00. But they are NOT really the crowd who's "buying their way to trending."

Fourth, true "shitposters" of every color and stripe, who take content that's barely recognizable as "content" and upvote it to sometimes ridiculous levels. A blurry selfie at $320.00? A nonsensical paragraph with no images, clearly run through a translator, upvoted to $200.00? A string of "naked" (as in, no description at ALL) links to YouTube clips, upvoted to $175.00 each? Clearly "re-spun" articles copied from the web, voted to $250.00? Yup, saw all of those.

As many argue, Steemit is a "free environment," so I'm only trying to point out these user groups, not to pass judgment on them.

We Now Welcome Content Spinning

What mostly inspired me to write this post was that I had a little "flashback" this morning, to a time a few months before the late great Squidoo content site (at one time an Alexa top-100 site) crashed, and again not long before social-media-that-pays site Bubblews crashed. 

What was it? 

Automated content spinners!

This morning, I actually saw a Steemit post that was basically a promotion for article spinning software. It basically promised that you could either enter a keyword, and the software would automatically write an article around that keyword, OR you could copy any piece of text (from an article, news site, or whatever) and the software would "re-write" it in such a way that it would be unrecognizable to any plagiarism software.

Shortly after that, I came across a rather nonsensical post that clearly was a "segment" of something else, that had also been run through a translator, and now posted as "original content."

I remember back in 2010-12 when Google really started cracking down on so-called "content farms" which were little more than eternally re-spun paragraphs of nonsense, posted to web sites over and over using "black hat" SEO techniques to gain visibility in searches. 

Some of you might also remember a time when you'd search for something, and most of the search results where merely links to more search results, not actual information. 

No Reason For Existing

I remember, back then, thinking how most of this content had no reason for existing, other than to facilitate some content farmer's ability to collect fractions of a cent from advertising revenue. 

The content added zero value to the overall web experience, it was annoyingly clogged with advertising, and in most cases just annoying to any user who might be lured into looking at it. 

What's more, it robbed revenue from legitimate bloggers and webmasters who provided real content... their ad revenues were "diluted" by the vast number of "empty clicks" that were diverted from real content.

I also remember — back then — thinking of the analogy of a town where you'd drive down Main Street and there'd be lots of stores with advertising banners and flashing neon "OPEN" signs, but if you stopped and actually went into one of those stores, they'd all be empty... and you'd learn that the only reason they existed was because someone had agreed to pay the shop owners 10 cents for every person through their front door.

In fact, there was no actual selling of anything, just "the ILLUSION that stores exist."

Of course, that's just an analogy.

But it does make you ponder... "Who could be BOTHERED to visit such a town?"

Maybe I'm Just Not Brave Enough...

What I find rather mindboggling — and what keeps bringing me back to the idea that I may not be brave enough for the world — is that there are actually lots of apologists for such systems. 

They seem to exist across almost all sectors of life. 

Some part of me accepts that; the part I am less accepting of is that the net effect of their presence tends to be akin to that of a swarm of locusts: There is a brief explosive feeding frenzy, followed by complete dereliction and famine for ALL... both the locusts themselves, AND the people who legitimately were growing crops.

The other mindbloggling thing is that people never seem to learn from history. That is, they may learn and change their approaches to how things are done, but they tend to forget about Human Nature... which seems to be eternally unchangeable. To continue the analogy, locusts don't "stop being locusts" just because you plant the crops in a different field, in a different arrangements. Nor because you "ask them nicely" to not show up. They are still going to come in and rape the land, UNLESS you install locust-proof netting around everything. 

Maybe I'm just too old for this (Ironically, the title of my introductory post from January 2017...), or too old-fashioned, in that I believe that in order for something — ANYTHING — to be created and exist, it ought to add some measure of value to our lives. But I could be wrong.

Well, that's about it, for the Sunday ramble-- hope you all have a great rest of your Sunday!

How About You? Are you familiar with "spun content?" Do you remember the days where searching for (for example) "digital cameras" would land you on a site with LINKS to more searches about digital cameras? Did these things annoy you? Do you think spun content might become a problem on Steemit? Would you ever use a "content spinner" instead of creating your own posts? Have you ever done so? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!

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(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for Steemit)
Created at 180603 11:25 PDT