My (3rd) Largest Online Community
I’ve been building up various social networks over the past few years in an attempt to learn more about social networking and to also increase my visibility as a writer (and hopefully find readers).
This morning I was rather horrified/amused to realize that my third largest online gathering ‘place’ was a test site I had created several months ago using wordpress and some social networking plug-ins. I had created the test site to explore a couple technical ideas I had.
Now it has a few hundred members on it! Without advertising or soliciting. And really without any features in the site.
Of course these members aren’t real people. They are spam bots and it seems that I’ve created a little virtual place for spam bots to go and solicit one another. There’s not a single living person in the entire mix.
Brent Knowles
Former lead designer at BioWare (Dragon Age: Origins, Neverwinter Nights). Creator of Raiders of the Serpent Sea.
2 Comments
Sohail Mansorry
There are very interesting theories about how living being arrive and prosper in newly formed islands, like Galapagos. For example, it seems spiders are generally among the first species to arrive in a newly formed island. They fly using their strings of spider web (wind helps them float and travel very long distances).
Studying these islands is an amazing opportunity for every scientist who is interested in evolution, ecology and biology.
Now this new website looks exactly like a newly formed island, with new species arriving on it.
I’d love to see what they are doing in that ‘colony’ or something…
Mordi Peshkess
I think you just started Skynet. Eventually all those Spam Bits will form into one giant bot conciseness and will have the “Am I alive?” moment.