Spam Can Be a Good Sign .:. Ph's Shorts 🩳

I'm finally back on Hive, slowly but surely... I don't know about you, but it's always a struggle for me to come back to the routine after taking a break/vacation... And this time, the break was almost 3 weeks when I had almost no strength (and time) to go online and engage on HIVE... I was "warming up" yesterday by reading some posts, leaving a few comments, and attending the @incublus's show in the Ecency discord... Today, it's time to write a post...

While I was checking out comments for replying, I bumped into one specific comment that caught my attention... It's not that it was super-interesting or such, but it was "different" than others... I know that some people reply automatically to posts without even reading them or using AI to do something like this, but this was different... It was a comment at one of the HHHLive recap posts and it looks like this...

It's obvious that it's a spam comment, and I think that this kind of comment is mentioned in one of the #HHHLive shows by @godfish or @friendlymoose (not sure who was from you two guys, sorry about that... 🙂) where the person would leave a comment with a link to the external website... What I found interesting is that the account that made it doesn't spam a lot of comments at once, but rather posts 1 comment in 2-3 months!

All that means is that not EVERY post is "targeted" to be spammed by an outbound link, but it's rather selective... In some weird way, it is "approval" that the post has VALUE to the spammer... In our case, the point of posting outbound links to other websites is probably to get a better Google rank... And you get a better ranking on Google if you are linked to GOOD websites/pages... I can't remember that I saw something like this on HIVE, for example, 3-4 years ago...

What could be the conclusion of all this? We can take many, but let me list two... The first one is that maybe our frontends (or one of them) have finally made a step forward in better search engine optimization for their pages... And the second could mean that this specific post had some value that made it stand out among others...

I'm happy if either of the two is true! 😃 If HIVE weren't valuable at all, it wouldn't attract bad actors to try to take advantage of it! On the other side, it is a problem to "fight" against them, but again, it's better to have that kind of issue than to have zero value and no bad actors!

Thank you for your time.

--ph--