Admittedly, this web site has fallen by the wayside a little. I started it as a creative outlet for some negativity I was encountering on a daily basis as I saw wrongs in the world around me and needed a positive outlet for that angst. Basically I created a blog with the express purpose of housing my complaints about things. I left open the option of adding comments, so that others may comiserate with me if they felt the need to, and perhaps though the sharing we could both feel a little bit better. Instead, I’ve had to spend many minutes of numerous days wading through enormous piles of spam comments. In fact, in the past year, I’ve not received so much as a single legitimate comment on any post I’ve written!

That tells me one of two things: Either nobody but bots reads this thing, which is fine – I created it for me, not for you – or nobody feels the need to comment. Also fine.

Therein lies the inherent, self-defeating theme of most rants in general: There is no satisfactory resolution. One can write, yell or interpretive dance all they want about a social injustice, an unfairness they’ve witnessed or endured, or problems with society, but for all the effort and energy spent in doing so, the only relief of that tension is in the act of complaining itself. Complaining itself is not a means to an end so long as it is not accompanied by action. In this case, my complaints about blog spam are completely useless unless I do something about it – like disabling comments.

I guess the other part of me is somewhat intrigued by spam. It’s prevalence indicates there must be something to gain from it or it would have died a long time ago. People must still be fooled by Internet scams or they would disappear. Many spam messages appear to exist for the sole purpose of posting a link to some other web page, perhaps in the hope of generating more traffic to it. I myself have never once clicked on a link to a web page in a spam message, though people must be doing it or else why flood the Internet in this way? And if it is still so prevalent, it must be effective, or at least extremely cost-effective. Maybe instead of complaining about Spam, I should get into the Spam business?