Mollom runs its business under the premise that you don’t want spam clogging up your website. Naturally you’ll only want the very best commenters so you can “have more time and energy to interact with your community”. They claim to have a 99.91% success rate in this field. But really, are they thinking about the little guy?
The little guy might enjoy your writing. But the little guy might like it so much that they must tell you about heavily discounted Viagra or getting better protection for your computer. Without this information, what will you do? How can your computer be protected against nasty viruses, and how can you sexually satisfy your significant other.
Perhaps your writing attracts a certain loner, ready and willing to bring you the best in online advertising. Maybe your website is the only way they can interact with humanity, since they suffer badly from agoraphobia. But Mollom doesn’t care about this individual. No, instead they are using the worst of internet etiquette against your very readership. In fact, they even bluntly state that they “kill unwanted content”. Honestly though, who doesn’t want to help out a member of royalty get their money out of their bank account for only a small fee? They even state that you’ll get a piece of the action, so Mollom just ruins that chance for you.
Your readership has a right to explain how important their rights are as your faithful followers. Online spam advertising brings in billions of dollars of revenue, lifting thousands of people out of poverty every day. Of course, these heartless Belgians couldn’t care less. And isn’t it ironic that Belgians want you to be closer to your community, despite the very fact that their country is being torn apart by indifference to the concept of the nation state. Maybe they should stick to what they are good at, making waffles and being Europe’s Canada.
Benjamin Schrauwen appears to be the ringleader, having grown in the demo scene, a sick perverse underworld of nerdom so extreme I can’t even explain in here on a music blog, which in itself is extremely nerdy. Oh, he says he has a blog, but you can’t even follow the link. Some computer programmer this guy must be. Each morning when he wakes up he paraglides over the drab, featureless Belgian landscape, wondering why he hasn’t moved to a more physically appealing country. Maybe a country that has trees or anything resembling “soul”. As he is up there, he looks for the .09% of spammers he hasn’t caught, and, when he finds them, he immediately hits them with a dart containing a deadly combination of Nutella and rattlesnake venom. Every time a spammer on the internet can no longer make pointless posts about pharmaceutical products for cheap, Ben gets a new pair of wings (gliders).
If Ben is the ‘bad cop’, spying on others from far above, Dries Buytaert presents a more positive face to the unsuspecting public. For one, his blog actually works. There you see his inner most workings reveled, like the international conspiracy to rid the internet of spam, delicious, barely relevant spam. And you see how an amateur photographer works, very immaturely.
Together they have their pictures up on Mollum’s website with the requisite sunglasses. Sunglasses are needed to cover their eyes, since it has been said that “eyes are the window to your soul”. Rather than expose their true evil, these Antwerps hide their true colors. They talk about “spambots” as if they weren’t living things, complete with emotions, grammatical errors and misspellings. So heavy is their sheer gall that they even call desirable content ‘ham’ with little to no concern about vegans who may operate websites and may take offense to such harshly worded language.
Spambots are needed. People need to feed themselves off of Spam, not everybody has access to high quality food products like some Western European populations. And they don’t charge, but they say “you MAY never have to pay for our service”. By using the word may instead of will, they open you up to potential gouging, all the while hiding behind obtuse European laws. The laws which are so absolutely boring that even the Europeans who wrote them don’t care.
They’ve already begun to charge. “Only 1 Euro per day” their site proclaims, but in US dollars that comes out to an unreasonable sum of money (via the collapse of the US dollar in foreign exchanges). Concern about the American way doesn’t end there. When asked if their system jeopardizes freedom of speech, they’re all like “Hells yeah it does, but it was like that when we got here”. Obviously this is an affront to the joy of speaking about offensive topics, like pornography or Nickelback. Falling back on an established way of doing things through the internet isn’t enough.
America is number one at Spam making, so perhaps Europe just wanted a little piece of the spam pie. Mollum will allow our Spam making competitors to beat us. I mean, we’re literally light years ahead of Iceland’s spam making abilities (1 spam attack) or Norway’s (3). That’s pitiful. We need to continue being number one at this, so our economy can grow more robustly. It is the roughest economic downturn that America has faced since the Great Depression. Please Mollum, let us have this one, not just for me, but for my future children, who yearn to tell you about discounted pharmaceuticals and offensive images. Thank you.