95% of User-Generated Content Is Bogus 192
coomaria writes "The HoneyGrid scans 40 million Web sites and 10 million emails, so it was bound to find something interesting. Among the things it found was that a staggering 95% of User Generated Content is either malicious in nature or spam." Here is the report's front door; to read the actual report you'll have to give up name, rank, and serial number.
It might be true, but it's also irrelevent. (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is that there are millions of old blogs, unused forums, ancient guestbooks, etc that are easy to spam automatically. While it might very well be true that 95% of comments on the internet are spam of some sort, they're probably read by a tiny fraction of internet users. People tend to stick to about a dozen big sites that get very little rubbish posted on them at all.
Car analogy: 95% of cars are rusty old heaps of crap that can't move. Thankfully they're in scrapyards and not on the roads.
Re:Nothing to see here. Move along. (Bad summary) (Score:5, Insightful)
And in addition, the report itself doesn't even explain the result. It's a bullet point at the beginning of the report, but there's no explanation or analysis.
The message... (Score:4, Insightful)
The subtext of this article is that you should forget about letting users create content on the Internet, because all they do is create junk and try to scam good honest people. Just leave the content creation to the institutions, and media conglomerates who know how to do it. It's safer that way, and you'll like it.
Well, I don't care if 99% of user-generated content it is crap; people need to be free to create it, because some individual in the other 1% may just come up with the cure for cancer, and despite whatever it does to Big Pharma's profits, everyone needs to be able to hear about it.
Re:It might be true, but it's also irrelevent. (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of forum software works well, until it gets "behind the curve", and then the site maintainer pulls the site*.
By "behind the curve" I mean any of the following can/does happen:
1) Forum software gets out of date and user fails to upgrade due to modifications or similar, resulting in spam.
2) Forum software gets popular without having a good security model and/or update cycle, resulting in exploits.
3) Gets inundated with comment approvals and the forum (or blog) gets ignored or set to auto-allow out of frustration.
* By "pulls the site" I mean "abandons it but doesn't take it down". That's typically the end result.
It's a lot of work to maintain your own forum and/or blog: managing spam can and will take hours+ from your day if you've not got a good automated and/or textual way to deal with it: web interfaces are clumsy.
Car analogy: 95% of cars are rusty old heaps of crap that can't move. Thankfully they're in scrapyards and not on the roads.
Yet, unlike most of those cars, the actual blog content is not necessarily useless. I have seen quite a few abandoned blogs and/or forums which have 3-10 year old information on them which is by no means useless; it's just getting buried.
Digital archeologists of the future will probably have to figure out an automated way to prune back the spam to find the actual Internet, the way things are going.
Consider: if spam accounts for 95% of all user-generated content, and said user-generated content is actually a non-trivial percentage of all actual content online (believable), consider how much bandwidth gets wasted by these spammers. (Thankfully, I suspect most of the 'user generated content spam' doesn't show up on the first couple search page results so it's not going to likely be perused with regularity - unless it's more heavily seeded on topics common folks search.)
can be adequately explained by stupidity (Score:2, Insightful)
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"
So I read "95% of User Generated Content is stupid" I agree, count me in.
Calling spam email UGC is... disingenuous. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would say that 95% of email is commercial in nature, and not "user generated content". To me "UGC" is something that people who are actually active users (consumers as well as creators) of a service generate... not something injected into the service from outside by predators.
Not so staggering... (Score:3, Insightful)
... a staggering 95% of User Generated Content is either malicious in nature or spam.
Considering 95% of internet users are malicious (see GIFT [penny-arcade.com]), it's hardly staggering that 95% of user generated content is malicious too. :p
Replace "UGC" with "Usenet" (Score:5, Insightful)
We've seen this before, with Usenet, BBS's, MUD's, and Email. The advertisers, and the trolls, find it easy to spew their material across many thousands of targets, and get enough money or gratification from doing so that it funds their efforts. It doesn't even have to make money: they just have to believe that it _can_ make money, and the professionals will simply continue.
Whatever would make anyone think that "User Generated Content" forums would be any different?
Re:This is slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
Google's fault for their dependence on linking (Score:4, Insightful)
Emails spam aside, I would say that most of that is Google's fault. The other 95% of content created on the internet is in an attempt to SEO web sites in the other 5% of the internet that people do potentially read or visit. Google encourages web masters to get in bound links, thus the whole industry of spamming sites, directories, blog feed sites, and so on that have one purpose and one purpose only: getting as many anchor text links pointed to sites as possible so they will rank higher in Google for key terms.