rdearman wrote:I did. And that user has responded in other threads, and you've replied to them.
I reckon Thomas90 is a bot too. Notice how the second post didn't actually address any of Cavesa's points, and was only sort-of related to the original post... almost like it was modelled on a possible response to the stimulus rather than being written by the same person.
Remember a couple of years ago when the botsmeisters' favourite technique was necroposting on long threads with a straight rip-off of a post from three or four pages (and 6-18 months) previously...?
I suspect the Thomas90-a-tron was programmed to respond in a vague manner in order to prevent the extremely sus post-now-and-forever-hold-your-peace approach.
I would personally recommend, as I said before, that the default response to this sort of single sentence newbie post is for someone to respond with a couple of questions and wait for evidence that there's a real person behind it before feeding the machines.
These bots are really messing up the internet, because...
tungemål wrote:"how to"-pages probably has a bigger chance to turn up in google searches.
More specifically, Google loves questions and answers.
If you put your search in in the form of a question, the results will usually be formatted as:
Several ads
Then a "Featured snippet" of about 5 lines from a page, usually part of a list.
A series of "People also ask" questions, where you click on the question and it gives you a one-paragraph answer ripped from a site. This is a double-edged sword for legitimate site owners, because on the one hand, Google leverages it to make it less likely for people to click away from Google (because now you've got the answer, why bother clicking?), but for the cheap bot-generated pages, who cares? Getting up there means getting clicks!
I got to that site through a question on Google, so I reckon the whole thing has been deliberately optimised to answer questions in Google-sized paragraphs, so that the algorithm will favour them.
If people are flooding out genuine knowledge with junk, that's not really in the greater interest, and I think we should all be pushing back against it.
I don't think my call for asking questions is unreasonable. It's not impolite -- if there is a genuine person behind the post (and honestly, I have no doubt that both of the posts in question are bots) it comes across as showing genuine interest, so no-one's going to be offended.