Every morning I go through the same routine. I wake up…take the dogs out…open the laptop…and then proceed to spend the next 10 minutes of my life clearing out all of the spam in my email, comments and Twitter accounts that has mysteriously found its way into my Internet life while I was asleep. It is getting ridiculous how much of our lives now are consumed with worthless tidbits of text that we really don’t want. It is getting to the point that we are having to take drastic measures that take away from the overall user experience of the web…and that is sad.
Recently, John Chow illustrated how spam Twitter users are able to make you auto-follow them…Darren at Problogger disabled comments on his blog older than 90 days and many other internet and blogging junkies are having to take steps in order to reduce their anti-spam minutes during the day. When is someone going to step up and come out with a script, program or something that seriously combats the issue of spam? It just makes it that much harder for quality content to get in front of the eyes of people who actually want to read it when 7 out of 10 of your emails are spam related. Don’t you want to help that guy out in Africa that wants to move his money to the US? Or do you really want to put your Twitter account on autopilot and gain 100 followers a day??!!
Yes, you can get rid of some of this annoyance through the use of Akismet and your .htaccess file for blogging. Unfortunately, there still no real solution for email and Twitter and Twitter is becoming the newest jet set hangout for spammers in their quest to saturate the world with meaningless crap.
When does it stop? When do we all stand up and not take it anymore? Just when we think we have figured out a way to fight the spam issue, they figure out a way to get around it. If we really want the web to be all it can be…spamming has to be minimized more than it is currently. I do not want Twitter and other social media outlets to go by the wayside just because spammers want to get their .01% conversion.
I am sick and tired of spending my time deleting messages on my cycling and blogging blogs about nude pictures and debt consolidation.
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