@Mimishu1995 “I’ve seen a fair share of spammer in my own language and it’s hard for me to believe the spammer is from another country”
Good point! Vietnamese spammers are an interesting outlier. Spam for Vietnamese companies almost always comes from Vietnam.
“Another connection between the Facebook spammers and the Fluther ones is that the Fluther spammers usually sell things few of us here would need.”
Sure, but that’s because spam is rarely targeted. The tactic is to post your advertisement everywhere without regard to whether it will reach an appropriate audience. It’s a game of quantity over quality. Because if they were only posting in places where the advertisement would be welcome, it wouldn’t be spam then would it?
“If the companies were outsourcing their spamming”
I didn’t say they were outsourcing. The spammer/company distinction was meant as more of a distinction between the person who took the spamming job versus the bosses who hired them. When I think of cleaning crews getting locked inside a Walmart overnight, I don’t really identify them with the company regardless of whether they work directly for Walmart or for an outside company hired by Walmart. They are wage slaves who put up with shitty jobs to feed themselves and their families.
That said, most spam (at least, the stuff that isn’t targeted at a rival company) is in fact outsourced. There are a lot of black hat SEO operations that construct spam bots and scripts and maintain lists of targets. And since they can be hired for a relatively low price, few companies employ their own IT departments for spamming purposes. (This also means that most companies probably aren’t fully aware of what is done in their names, but I don’t think that really forgives them one bit.)
“And don’t forget the spammers with profiles that go something like ‘Hi, my name is Sarah. I’m an IT expert and has a passion for AI development ever since I was in high school. Please visit my blog for more info’”
Well, a lot of those are fake (the links either don’t go where they say they go or the “blog” turns out to be a series of paid advertisements). And the ones that are real usually aren’t advertising for a big company. They are spamming for themselves, which is a slightly different matter. And even still, a surprising number of those come from third parties.
Keep in mind that this is not the only site that I have moderated for, and I have access to a lot more information about these spammers than you do. Certain patterns have emerged over the course of my 15 years doing this kind of thing. So while there are certainly outliers and exceptions, what I said above holds true for the vast majority of cases.