Let the products sell themselves. Fuck advertising, commercial psychology. Psychological methods to sell should be destroyed.

I'm generally curious what you the reader thinks. So for the last 8 years I've attempted to keep the barrier to blog comments as low as possible. No registration or codewords necessary, not even a real name. In fact some of the best comments have been from Anonymous. And some of the worst too. Regardless of identity —or lack thereof— I'm genuinely interested in all responses from real people.  

Unfortunately I've now gotta pull the plug on that system. Not because of trolls —most of whom I actually find entertaining. Sergei, that's you!— but spam. Somehow the Spambots have figured out that B is vulnerable, and they've been attacking with ads in the form of comments. These are usually on older posts, perhaps because I'm less likely to notice? For several years the number was manageable but over the past few months the pace has accelerated to the point where it now dominates all other comments. 

Here's a sampling of one hour of blog spam:




Here's a typical message:

It's a chain of various keywords and links designed to sell something or other, I have no idea what. The "sentences" have no normal syntax. They're just word groupings. It's spam designed to be picked up by Crawlers. Robots talking to robots. I've tried in earnest but I can't think of one thing in the universe less meaningful than a robot selling a product to another robot. It really sucks the big one. Hard! 

The Minutemen voiced similar thoughts 30 years ago in Shit From An Old Notebook:

Let the products sell themselves.
Fuck advertising, commercial psychology.
Psychological methods to sell should be destroyed.
Because of their own blind involvement in their own conditioned minds...
The unit bonded together... 
Morals, ideals, awareness, progress...

In other words, corporate advertising sucks. When I see an advertisement I make a note NOT to buy that product. So the idea that someone would advertise through my blog isn't just ironic. It's offensive. Maybe D. Boon and Mike Watt would feel the same. But they lived in an easier world. At least the ads back then were made by humans for humans. A world in which robots pitch products to other robots is fucking insane. 

I spend time deleting these ads. It's an unproductive hassle. So I'm out. From now on comments will require registration. I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience. 

P.S. If you're a tech-person and can think of another way, please let me know.