# Periphery Demographic

Originally published: 2012-09-12
Canonical URL: /2012/Sep/periphery-demographic/

Judging by the comment moderation queue, this blog is wildly popular among a certain niche audience.

Namely, spambots. Although I can't help but wonder why spammers are so _incompetent_. Of course spammers have no reason to put any effort into the _marginal_ comment or email. The reason spam exists is precisely because in a magical land of near-zero marginal cost (like the internet), the unscrupulous can afford to send sales pitches to a million people [even if only fifteen bite](http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html). But that doesn't mean spammers couldn't put a little fixed-cost effort into improving their algorithm for generating those millions of spams. At least conventional advertising is occasionally entertaining; in contrast, most of the spam I see is just _noise_, to the extent that it once gave me an idea (which I would not implement; it's not my style) for a Reddit novelty account: "CompetentSpammer" would write eloquent, insightful comments that ever-so-subtly worked in references to charm bracelets and sketchy pharmaceuticals.

I know, it sounds as if I'm complaining, but I'm not: we are all grateful that spam is so easily distinguished from actual content; I was only wondering.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, some commentary on spam comments submitted to this blog is below the break—

Would-be commenter "charms" writes on "[Summing the Multinomial Coefficients](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/09/summing-the-multinomial-coefficients/)":

> I adore thomas family funeral home! I got my initial couple as soon as i was initially 10 yrs old, the sunlight yellow quite short old classic.Now i'm 15 yrs old nowadays and also, since after that, I have got as well received your ebony quite short old classic, your bleak quite short old classic, [...]

And it goes on like that for another ninety words. One wonders: is anyone _really_ going to buy shoes or whatever based on a blog comment like that? Maybe, _maybe_ fifteen out of a million ... which I guess was the point. But again, one imagines that there would be a payoff to spammers for being more discriminating—I guess some them are. I got a few attempted comments referring to [Zack Snyder](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zack_Snyder), so someone's at least paying attention to the URL.

I even got one attempted comment that sort-of _looks_ on topic, maybe, if you don't look too closely? "Alexey" writes on "[Interpolating Between Vectorized Green's Theorems](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/06/interpolating-between-vectorized-greens-theorems/)":

> Great! I see how to finish it off now, and I see why given the dftierenfial equation and being told to look at F and f you would see that relation, but just introducing F in the first place well, I guess I just have to accept this proof is awesome. =DYou asked for topic areas: Have you ever seen Euler's proof that the number of partitions of a number into odd numbers equals that of a number into distinct numbers? That is a good one. Other than that, some Galois theory would be nice?

The comment throws around a lot of math terminology, but if it has any non-coincidental relationship to my post, I don't see it. And the URL supplied just goes to a near-empty Facebook profile. What's even the motive here? Maybe I'm wrong to think of this as "spam", when it could be a genuine math enthusiast who's confused, or bad at commmunicating in English? Who can say but that, in the end, what we really hate are low-quality comments, and we don't care whether or not they're trying to sell us something? (See also [_xkcd_ #810](http://xkcd.com/810/).)