If you’ve ever commented on one of my blog posts and wondered why it took some time for the comment to show up, it’s because I have to review them all manually to screen out automated comments from Russia. Unlike the Google chatbot that’s been in the news lately, these Russian bots are nowhere close to sentient — their comments have nothing to do with the post they’re attached to, and they never say anything self-revealing. As a public service, I offer some samples (translated from the Russian by Google), with links omitted:

The most important component in the foundation of a bookmaker’s office are all silhouettes as well as lines.

An extremely important part of your outfit is a motorcycle helmet. It’s more important though that your riding gear fits you exactly and fits your size.

Blackbutt is a unique ecoregion inhabited by many peoples, with snowy mountain domes separating the subtropical coastline.

Although these comments can be informative — for example, I never knew that it was possible for mountain domes to separate a coastline — I’ve never been able to figure out why the bots (or, rather, their human overseers) go through the effort of posting them. Are there really readers who are so interested in a blog post that they go on to read the comments, encounter a comment that is clearly irrelevant and mercenary, and then are so stimulated by what the comment says that they go on to click a link? I want to know who those people are.

I don’t mean to be patronizing here. I understand that there are people who are inexperienced in the ways of the online world and are therefore vulnerable to scams. (I’ll admit that one phishing email was so well made that even I fell for it.) What I don’t get is why some people willingly trust strangers whose intent to deceive is right out in the open. For example, if you receive an email whose subject line says something like “You’ve won our grand prize!” but whose message, when you click on it, turns out to be an ad for generic Viagra, you’ll probably delete it immediately. But the continued existence of such emails implies that there are recipients who instead say, “Haha!  You’ve successfully tricked me into opening your email! Therefore I will send you money.” The existence of such people mystifies me.

Slightly better than the sellers who openly deceive their potential customers are those who willfully annoy them. I’m thinking of the merchants who leave flyers tucked under the windshield wipers of my car, forcing me to (A) physically handle the flyer, (B) read it to make sure it’s not a parking ticket, and (C) carry it around until I can find a place to recycle it. My temptation is always to take such a flyer to the originating business and hand it back, saying “Excuse me, but you accidentally left this on my car, and I’m sure you want it returned,” but that response would only be effective if everybody did it. Instead, there are apparently people who treat the flyer as an incentive to order a pizza, go to a nightclub, or whatever, thereby rewarding the business for wanton littering.

Finally, there are those sellers — generally, but not always, online — who consider me the kind of person who would sell out my friends. “Here’s your personal link,” they’ll say. “Anytime a friend uses this link to buy our product, you’ll get a reward!” In other words, they’re saying that they know that my friend wouldn’t be interested in receiving advertising from them, but that perhaps my friend would be open to getting advertising from me. Even in the rare event that I would really have wanted to recommend a business to friends, this strategy makes it much less likely. (And if I do recommend it to a friend, I certainly won’t give them my “personal link,” which would constitute a clear case of conflict of interest.)

Speaking of recommendations, how do you handle those surveys that ask you “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend?” Even if I really like the product or service, my answer is always 1, because I rarely give friends advice on what to buy. (If they end up being unhappy about their purchase, I’ll feel partly responsible.) I once admitted this in a Facebook post, and one of the commenters got very upset about it. “You just fucked up their performance statistics!” she said, but all I was doing was honestly completing the survey. If the business wants me to give them a 9 or 10, they’ll have to ask a better question.