Half a month after creating this WordPress website and slowly adding content to it, I finally got my first comment. It was spam. Some sort of affiliate scheme for Youtube and TikTok.
Thankfully I had set up WordPress so that every comment must be approved beforehand, so the spam bot posting the comment never succeeded in creating backlinks to their website. Or is it some competitor trying to ruin that website's reputation by running spam bots against them? Who knows.
In any case, it's a waste of my and everyone else's time. It's some sort of tragedy of commons. Everyone could make their own spam bot to spam their own websites earning traffic at everyone else's expenses, but if they did this, comments would be mostly spam, and there would be no reason to have comments in first place then.
In fact, I'm pretty sure that's already the case. The reason we can't just post in websites without signing up isn't because everyone wants to keep track of your comments or use your profile for some nefarious ad-targeting, it's because you could be a spam bot, so an account is a way to ensure you are not. And that doesn't even really work.
I imagine there's some poor human fellow out there who can't solve captchas, and we're keeping him outside of the internet because of all the spammers.
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