For years I've been blogging and the routine has been pretty much the same. I spend some considerable time (usually hours) preparing something which I'd then post. Seconds later, the site would be visited by web crawlers that grab the new content and deliver it to the various places on the internet where people find original web content. If that content has some popular appeal (i.e. has a dumb enough title to attract the casual surfer), I might get ten or twenty visitors hitting on that one article in the next half hour. Sometimes there can be hundreds and on rare occasions the number can run into the multiple thousands.
However, things have been different this week. The web crawlers have stayed away. The blog statistics are hardly moving and the blog has become a one-sided conversation with silence. I feel zero motivation for writing or drawing and psychologically, spiritually, and emotionally, that is not a good thing. Yesterday I noticed zero traffic for an hour and then I had one hit. One hit! And even then it was the kind of visitor with poor spelling that I don't want to encourage since they make me feel generally miserable about the world.
'Vuiable porn'? That's too wonderfully bad to be a typo. That's just a terrible indictment of our educational system.
So, whoever controls the web: please release the crawlers. Send them back to me otherwise I might as well abandon this blog and allow the web to further descend towards a single continuum of articles with titles such as '8 Celebrities With Great Skin Rashes' and '21 Film Stars Who Look Great Naked In Sump Oil'. And, sadly, that's what so much of the web is slowly becoming. It's the web's version of heat death but instead of heat the end will be an entropy of utter banality.
I have no doubt that the morons will ultimately win. Even the better websites out there are using the same companies to provide those 'Sponsored Links' at the end of every article (see the end of this article for examples). You probably know the sort of thing I mean. They're provided by companies like Outbrain and Taboola who should really sponsor a circle of Dante's Hell. They have pictures which just bait you into clicking on them with titles like 'You Won't Believe These People Exist' or 'See The Woman Who Is Half Hippopotamus'. Often they take you to a website where they promise to show you a list of things, one thing to a page, and you have to click through them (and their adjacent advertising) just to see the one thing on that list that originally baited your interest. Only when you get to the last item do you realise that the picture they'd showed you wasn't even in the list of things they did show you. They promise that you will 'See 20 Historic Photographs That Will Amaze You' but it's followed by 20 photos of pretty banal things such as the day Muhammad Ali met Robin Williams or a picture of Bill Gates when he was young. Bill Gates was once young! Well, who would have known?
Another classic of the genre is a picture of an old rusted pipe sticking out of some grass. The link title reads: 'Someone Stumbled Across This In The Woods... Beneath It Was A Terrifyingly Awesome Secret.'.
What could this 'terrifyingly awesome secret' be? For me, a terrifyingly awesome secret would have to involve the American military, blue skinned space lizards, and/or a fifteen foot avatar that looks just like Sigourney Weaver. A 'terrifyingly awesome secret' does not equate to photographs of an old WW2 bunker yet that's exactly where the link takes you with captions as exciting as these highlights:
'The entrance was originally covered with a wooden lid, but it was removed with a crowbar.'
'Acoustics inside of the bunker made everything much more horrifying'.
'There were junctions everywhere. It'd be tempting to turn down just one and end up lost...'
The whole thing is an utter sham and they do nothing but waste your time so some internet huckster can earn a fraction of a penny from the advertising. And if you're like me, you generally feel like such a heel for ever following a link that had tickled your particular peccadillo. I admit, I'm just like the rest of mankind. I have fairly pedestrian tastes when it comes to flesh. I find it hard not to click on cleavage. A link titled '10 Actresses Who Look Great When Leaning Forward In Low Cut Dresses' is not something I can look at and not click.
Sites such as those will ultimately win the internet. Mass produced websites with zero real content, generally written by low paid hacks via sites like Amazon Turk, and heavily loaded with advertising will kill it for the rest of us. We are simply too small to get good advertising deals and spend too long trying to create something meaningful to make any of this worth it. The next step towards their total dominance is when the web crawlers stop crawling our sites.
And did I mention that this week the crawlers stopped crawling?
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