Two signs of computer-driven fakery:
1. When you see an exponential pattern you know it’s done by computers, not humans. The real world doesn’t do exponential. The real world follows either a sine wave driven by sun and moon, or a tanh shape driven by life. Both are somewhat obscured by random noise, but usually visible from a broad enough view.
2. When you see a huge pile of names and addresses, and each name is doing the same thing, you know it’s computer-driven. This applies to all sorts of spam. Phone spam is the same message from a hundred different phone numbers. Email spam is the same message from a hundred different email addresss.
The “readers” of this blog are nearly all fake now, as seen by both of these indications. In the past I had a few real readers, but they seem to have disappeared. Human readers have a constant identity, and tend to read in a meaning-based pattern.
This pattern from the last seven days shows both markers. The “reads” are increasing exponentially. Within each day the number of “addresses” is almost the same as the number of “reads”. The last one has 160 “reads” by 159 fakely different “addresses”. It’s possible that one of those addresses was human, but the others are bots.
3. A third sign is peculiar to blog-stealing bots. I’ve noticed it for many years in my old Blogspot blog and here at WordPress. A large number of bots read one specific item first, then go on to read other items near it. The latest pivot point is a comment on an 1890s monopoly in hot-lead typography, with 13 reads this week and 7 reads last week. Pivot items are insignificant, NOT the sort of piece that real people would find interesting or worth passing along. I don’t know how or why the bots choose a pivot. If they’re trying to look like real readers, the tactic doesn’t work.
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Later: The bot infestation stopped after I wrote the above item, and the item has two real readers. Thanks, real people! I appreciate you.
Polistra's Mill 