Reflections on Spam

No, not the Monty Python type. 🙂

Been thinking about this as the General Forum currently has two spammers.
Spammer A bothers me a lot, Spammer B doesn't bother me at all.

So I'm examining my own reactions. Clearly the problem lies with my perceptions, rather than the posts themselves. Otherwise they'd both bother me, or neither would bother me.

Seems I'm making assessments of the individual posters, and then reacting according to who posted rather than what was posted.

Do others react the same way to different spammers, or are we all doing what I seem to be doing?

Well percepted. I would say. Indeed when two do the same thing is is not the same at all. A lot depends on our relationships to them.

Indeed I am not bothered much by the spamming. Though I was itched by the disrespectful posts of a vanished person.

Well, there is nothing new there. It is a bias based on perception... was it
the halo effect? I need to revisit my texts on cognitive biases.

The post that was quoted here has been removed

Spam is in the eyes of the beholder, just like beauty --or the lack of it. There
is, however, an element of aggression in it, of power by means of imposing
on others something which the other considers intrusive, offensive, or plain
violent. And, in the purest Foucaultian tradition, wherever there is power
there is resistance. Henceforth, spam is determined not by the spam itself
but by the degree and extension of the resistance to it.

The post that was quoted here has been removed

Reflecting much?

Originally posted by Ponderable
Well percepted. I would say. Indeed when two do the same thing is is not the same at all. A lot depends on our relationships to them.

Indeed I am not bothered much by the spamming. Though I was itched by the disrespectful posts of a vanished person.

Is it a secret between a few of whom this "vanished" person is?

And who is Spammer A and Spammer B (talking to Kewpie). I'm guessing Grampy Bobby is one of them.

Why do some some people here feel the need to say something about someone in the public domain and yet feel they can't say who it is they are talking about - as though that makes it more acceptable, or something? This is one of the most annoying habits of "Spammer A" and they are constantly called out for it.

Spam is defined by wikipedia as follows: "Forum spam consists of posts on Internet forums that contains related or unrelated advertisements, links to malicious websites, and abusive or otherwise unwanted information."

I think its a basically accurate definition but it really ends up being up to the individual to define what spam is to them. It doesn't take very long to figure out who posts things that are not worth reading, and it also doesn't take much to just skip them and move on to things that are more interesting. What is considered to be "spam" by one person may be seen as acceptable "humor" by others.

If you think something is spam, then ignore it and move on to what you're interested in.
If you like the post, then read on and enjoy it.
It is a waste of your time if you are trying to be a self-appointed forum sheriff. 🙂

Spammer A and Spammer B weren't intended to be particular people, I'm not being roundabout here. I'm actually thinking about several regular posters. A and B represent extremes of my different personal reactions to different posters. Anyone can spam if they wish, nobody (including me) has to read if they don't want to.

I'll have to read up on Seitse's halo effect. I know nothing about psychology.

Originally posted by Kewpie
Spammer A and Spammer B weren't intended to be particular people, I'm not being roundabout here. I'm actually thinking about several regular posters. A and B represent extremes of my different personal reactions to different posters. Anyone can spam if they wish, nobody (including me) has to read if they don't want to.

I'll have to read up on Seitse's halo effect. I know nothing about psychology.

I see, apologies for misunderstanding. Not that an apology is really called for, unless of course you feel impinged by my previous comment, in which case you can put both out reactions down the the whatsitthingy that seitse mentioned in his first post. 😀

The post that was quoted here has been removed

Yes this place is like an audience, that is why it's called a forum. I'm often reminded of my time hanging out on the marble pavements and in the temples of Ancient Rome.

Originally posted by mwmiller
Spam is defined by wikipedia as follows: "Forum spam consists of posts on Internet forums that contains related or unrelated advertisements, links to malicious websites, and abusive or otherwise unwanted information."

I think its a basically accurate definition but it really ends up being up to the individual to define what spam is to them. It doesn't tak ...[text shortened]... ead on and enjoy it.
Just don't waste your time trying to be a self-appointed forum sheriff. 🙂

Excellent comments. Also, 1) Our perceptions of other people are conditioned and/or informed by the frequency and proximity of our contact with them. Have they been conditioned/informed from afar in an online public forum through the lens of its prevailing standards of civility or privately via personal messages or emails or telephone calls or Skype or by having actually been in their presence offline? 2) "Beauty" is less a matter of being in the subjective eyes of the beholder than in the actual mind's eye of the beheld, i.e. that which makes an.individual unique and worth knowing. 3) If the pygmies who each perceived the elephant differently because of their various vantage points circumferentially from trunk to tail were here today, each would probably reply to the objective questions raised by Kewpie's original post in a different way. 4) In summary, as a well known author [may have been John Locke] once observed: "We arrive at the truth through the honest disagreement among friends." Adversarial attitudes and personal attack mode breed dysfunction and spam..

Originally posted by Grampy Bobby
...Adversarial attitudes and personal attack mode breed dysfunction and spam.

Would you classify referring to fellow (but of course as always in your case, unspecified) posters as having: "jungle savagery", "psychotic jealousy", "fouled diapers" or "stinking vomit".... As being reflective of you having an "adversarial attitude"?

I would guess that most regular forum readers, like myself, eventually develop mental filters. I very definitely look at who posted before reading a post. Some posters I ignore (-r, -w {= no read, no write}), others I read but don’t reply to (r, - w), still others I sometimes read and sometimes reply to (+/-r, +/-w).

My advice to anyone who ever feels upset by a post is: look inside yourself, find out what button the post pushed, and then disconnect that button.