something bewildering happened to me the other day: i got an ad in my comments. someone wrote a spambot for cohost, which found a post i'd written that Mentioned a Videogame, and replied to it with a recommendation to go do online gambling. and i can't stop thinking about it.
because like, it's not the beginning of the end. cohost is just bad at propagating advertising; I'm the only person who saw that post, so it's astonishing that they even bothered. Writing a bot, let alone paying a human to scrub the site and manually post ads, is not worth it. Yes, we've all seen ads in incredibly silly places, but this is not like any other website in existence.
The entire scam economy of the internet, the background radiation we've all become completely accustomed to, is based on a set of design principles that have been common for decades. Websites want to surface user contributions, they want to highlight how Popular an article is, or highlight the comments below it, because it drives further engagement and increases search rankings and all this other bullshit that, eventually, makes them sell another sidebar ad.
Because every website is SEOed up the ass, and because billions of people are using google at all times and (apparently) just randomly clicking on everything that comes up, the minimum hitrate on any website is just phenomenal. If you write a bot that posts keno ads on any website, it is going to get seen by thousands of people. If four of them are clueless enough to fall for your shit, it paid for itself.
But the whole thing hinges on mass visibility. Most people are actually not stupid enough to click on anything in a banner ad! No matter how dumb we think the unwashed masses are, they really aren't; it's just that there are so, so, so many people, moving so fast, that if .05% of them are feckless enough to click on an obvious fucking lie, that still ends up being a couple dozen purchases. Enough to pay for the scam.
Spam works because they are emailing an unimaginable number of people. If you have to spend $30 to rent a VM to send all these emails, but you con just one person into sending you $200 - you won! But it only works if you have millions of hits, tens of millions of pairs of eyes.
You can't get millions of eyes here. It's impossible; the website doesn't have millions, and even if it did, there is simply no way for that comment to ever surface. You can't even rechost a comment! The only person who EVER would have seen it is me, and maybe someone who happens to find my post and manually click on comments and read every single one of them. I bet in ten years, that ad would have gotten 200 views, and it's statistically probable that all 200 of them would have rolled their eyes and reported it as spam.
It wouldn't have worked as a chost either. Even if they'd somehow dressed it up in a more convincing lozenge, nobody would have rechosted it, and even if they did, it never would have spread more than two or three degrees away from my account.
Cohost is simply structurally incapable of supporting spam. And that doesn't highlight how special Cohost is; it highlights how fucking pathological the rest of the web is. We're on year 15 or 20 of every single website being exploitable in this way, every site being a megaphone that someone can grab. Maybe they only get it for 3 seconds, but in that brief moment they manage to shout "COME TO KINGS DIAMOND CASINO 3RD AVE FREE PENNY SLOTS 2-3 PM TUESDAYS", and the reach of that megaphone is so vast that some unbelievable fucking dipshit in the audience goes "oh sounds good i should hit that place." And this is why everything's bad; this is why every website is unusable, because every single one makes itself a viable target for fucking arbitrage, the kind of fraud committed by stealing a thousandth of a penny ten million times.
Cohost effortlessly avoids being a megaphone through simply not including features that are largely unmissed except by people who want to exploit you en masse. Maybe, just maybe, there's a lesson here.
