Recently every post I wrote got a dozen or more spam messages. As a result of this flood of spam comments Akismet or another app said “You need to pay due to the volume of spam comments. It struck me as tremendously unfair. Most blogs have little to no income, so if spammers target them with comments, and we saturate the limit of blocked spam messages then we’re paying for a nuissance to go away.
Continuing on from yesterday’s theme of publishers harming themselves through their behaviour today I want to comment on the fad of adding hyperlinks to comments rather than directly into a post. The idea is that you can use the image you want, and by clicking to see comments facebooks counts this as engagement.
It’s worth mentioning that if I click on a hyperlink facebook knows, and the website knows, so nothing is gained by forcing us to jump through the “comments” hoop. This is especially true since once three or four views have been expressed in a comment the rest is noise.