Quote Originally Posted by valadil View Post
So then we have to click on a few obvious spam messages a day to trick them right? They'll continue making spams obvious so we can ignore it except when doing our civic duty.
thats not how it works.

they WANT you to click, they don't care what you click. whatever you click, makes them money, it just determines which part of their scheme is making money off of you. they want you to focus on something. focus leads to personalization and tailoring to your viewpoint, or at least the viewpoint that the data thinks you have. and advertisers are eventually going to recognize that the obvious methods eventually won't work at all anyways.

they are not aiming for a group, they are aiming for the individuals. it doesn't matter which individual it is. its all about projecting the image that world online isn't something that will scare you away or challenge you, because that leads to people not clicking on stuff. its all a lure. taking different bait won't do anything. you still have the problem.

and even if you somehow find a way, there are more subtle methods still. there is pretty much a growing market for information gained from what people click online. the cookies and all that, that detect what you what you click on and are interested in on say, Google? yeah all that information is then sold to advertisers trying to make advertising personal until you only see ads they think only you will be interested in- as in, seven billion demographics of one. they probably have pretty much all or most of the internet observed this way.

and this shows no sign of stopping. you click on something, and it will change the net for you, not immediately but over time? eventually it narrows you down and profiles you. then it starts creating your own little world in the net filtering out any unwanted information. a filter bubble if you will, a space where only what you want is within and anything outside can penetrate, an accidental self-made deception and isolation.

that is the trend things are going nowadays, and if it continues, you can kiss goodbye the concept of a global village. because everyone will be in their own little island. problem is, you have to eventually go outside the island. you can't stay there forever.

its not just a problem here, its a trend everywhere. marketing to general groups and audiences is becoming outdated. marketing to individual people is what the future will be.

as for how this affects the current spambot problem? I wouldn't be surprised if they somehow figure out the general interests of the people this site sooner or later, and have already figured out how to make it subtle enough to lure you in. forget trying to trick them, the unsubtle ones are already gone by now. and thats probably the trend elsewhere as well, they are probably making fake accounts on Facebook to do the very same thing but on even bigger scale as we speak.

the only saving grace I can possibly think of, is that roleplaying seems to be an obscure hobby and therefore doesn't have much advertising behind it, at least to my point of view, so they wouldn't be able to make any spambots advertising rpgs, because there is no ads for them. at least for now.