Why do spammers use spam-like subject lines?

I think part of it is an effort to get people to open what ever it is. People think “what the hell is this” and click on it.

It’s not a strategy. They are just not that good at it. Many of them are working in a culture and often a language that’s unfamiliar to them. They are paid very, very little money. The plan is to get links out in the world and grab attention. It’s unlikely that anyone is getting much training. They’re probably spamming for a bunch of different companies who have outsourced their marketing in an attempt to pay as little as possible. This is not a career, it’s a job done by tired and stressed people, mindlessly churning out links to meet a random and possibly unreasonable quota so they don’t get fired by their supervisor (who probably also has no idea what’s going on).

@zenvelo I think that might work for the first few spam emails. But not very effective after awhile. Though maybe they’re just banking on that.

@longgone Huh…I always assumed spam emails were written by bots.

@raum I have a friend who has an Etsy shop. Her English is rusty and she knows nothing about Western culture. And the names of her products just read like something a spammer would write, something like “best calendar cute mystical creature best price 2023”.

Spamming nonsensical words is actually a common tactics for SEO, spamming as many keywords as possible so that it will appear on search results. But some people, like my friend, just don’t understand that. They don’t know how SEO and other marketing-related things work. They just think putting several related words would somehow magically give them clicks. It’s just a monkeys see monkey do situation.

There is also the language problem too. A lot of the time the spammers write in their own language and use a translator for English, and the result isn’t pretty but they can’t tell because they don’t speak the language. That also explains the punctuation problems since different cultures have different ways to use punctuations.

And worse still, some people actually look at that jumbled mess and think that is the right way to write, since they don’t know anything about other culture and their only point of reference is other spammers. In the case of my friend, she actually got that jumbled mess of a name by copying other spammy names, then changing things up a bit to match what she sells. She genuinely thinks this is how a product should be named.

And my friend isn’t some overworked spammer trying to make end’s meet. She opened the shop willingly, and she did “market research”, which consists of taking the first results on Google as the gospel.

So yeah, I would say ignorance of other culture, language barrier, and incompetence and maybe entitlement.

@raum A lot of the process is automated, for sure. Bots can help replicate and distribute spam. But I don’t think there are fully automated spam processes. In my experience, people overestimate bots and underestimate bad translation.

I worked with a team of overseas curators once. They were definitely real people, but their English was broken and interspersed with Google Translate (like @Mimishu1995 said). They sounded exactly like the spam emails I get. They had that customer service politeness going on and they were hard workers, but it was obvious that half the time, we just could not actually understand each other. Their job was to categorize threads according to topics (kind of like Fluther’s tags), and they would say stuff like “How are you this morning? I have ran into a problem. For ‘plants’ should I label ‘barks’, ‘betroot’? Please suggest me ASAP.”

There’s a family from Ukraine living in my house. They don’t speak English or German, we don’t speak Ukrainian. Google Translate is very helpful, but we have to use short sentences and a sort of sterilized language without any complicated phrases. Otherwise, we end up with stuff like “Well, we buy a salve for such a Siamese people, a cat with folded ear is no national Scotsman.” That’s an actual example.

@longgone to bank on your answer, there is an app in my country which is basically the Vietnamese Amazon. Apart from Vietnamese selling there are other sellers who are not Vietnamese most of them are Chinese. And you can easily tell if a product is sold by a Vietnamese or a Chinese. The names of Vietnamese products are always straightforward and concise, while the Chinese products have really laughable nonsensical spammy names like “useful device night light for baby calm happy”. So things like that can really happen across languages. It’s either a failed attempt at SEO, or ignorance of languages.

@longgone Well, we buy a salve for such a Siamese people, a cat with folded ear is no national Scotsman.

Amazing! Reminds me of the current middle school craze to run song lyrics through google translate into another language and then back to English. They’re pretty hilarious!

Sounds like I’ve definitely been overestimating bots. Figured the bad translation was also a bot issue!

@Mimishu1995 I remember when I used to sell on eBay, I’d cram listings with as many search words that I could think of. :P

@Mimishu1995 Right. And some of those people might be really smart, like your friend, but if they haven’t experienced the ridiculousness of bad translation, they don’t know what they sound like. I know I have no way of knowing whether my translations into Ukrainian make sense. I’d need a native speaker to check. Computers are just not at that level yet.

@raum That song lyrics game sounds pretty fun! Educational, too. You can use it to teach your kids to spot spam. Have you seen James Veitch replying to spam emails? I just went down a YouTube rabbit hole watching ten of his videos, and it’s weirdly captivating.

Also, about that cat with folded ear not being a national Scotsman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Fold.

@longgone That video made me laugh so hard I was silent wheezing.

@longgone I agree completely that people who don’t know a language can’t see when a sentence sounds odd, but in my friend’s case, she does know some English and has a basic knowledge of how an English sentence structures. It’s just that she is totally new to the Western market scene, so she just did what she does best: finding the first result for her search term. And she came across other spammy listings and thought it was the right way to do it.

Seriously though, a lot of practice that is considered spamming here is actually expected in my country. You can’t imagine how rampant spams are here. Go to a random FB post on a random entertainment page and you’ll see spam posts in the comments. That page may even spam themselves through misleading posts and stuff. There is really a disconnect among cultures.

I think it’s a good thing they use that dumb stuff so it’s easy to spot them. Makes it much easier to delete their junk.

@Dig_Dug while they lack in intellect, they make up for it with persistence and number. There is a reason why spams are still here today.

We can just keep swatting them like flies!