(no subject)

[ewx]

Some email users say they are using electronic mail less now because of spam.

The mail I save (which excludes cronmail and spam, but includes LJ comment notifications and a few low-volume announcement mailing lists; basically anything with an interested human at both ends) has increased a bit by raw volume lately, although not by much; however since July more than half of it (by message count) has been LJ comment notifications. The conclusion would seem to be that the conversations I used to have by email are now happening on livejournal instead, and up to a point this is true, though the subjects and actors seem to have changed somewhat. It's hard to determine the root cause of this; the spam volume doesn't dissuade me from sending people email, but perhaps it's encouraging other people I know to use LJ instead, carrying me along as an indirect effect.

My usenet posting volume has collapsed, too; 2002 saw about a 20% increase over 2001 (line count) but at the current rate 2003 is going to be around half of what 2003 was. It's harder to make an argument that spam has anything to do with this as (for whatever reason) I don't see anywhere near as much usenet spam as email spam; you could much more easily argue that LJ is responsible (both directly and in the indirect way described above) but I also feel less inclined to respond to things on usenet than I used to. That said I stopped reading some high-volume groups earlier this year for reasons unrelated to LJ, so it could just be a coincidence of timing.

Comments

[simont]

Depressingly, LJ itself is now beginning to attract spam. Several people on my Friends page recently found some of their world-readable entries had attracted spam comments of the form "hi I added you to my friends list hope that's ok" followed by a link "katies journal" which actually went to a porn site.

(Entertainingly, the link didn't work in some browsers, because the spammer put a double backslash after the "http:" rather than a double forward slash. I can only assume that IE is slash-direction-blind and didn't mind...)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I had one of those a week or so ago (always ahead of the curve, me) but deleted it before anyone else seemed to notice.

[gerald_duck]

Noted. Time to turn on screening for anonymous posts, then.

Actually, what would be nice is a facility like Erdös Numbers on Livejournal. You have a friend number of 0, your friends have a friend number of 1, their friends have a number of 2, etc. I'd be tempted to limit comments to people with a friends number of three or less.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

I feel more justified than ever in my decision to make everything I post friends-only.

[rmc28]

That makes me glad I screen comments except for people on my Friends list. No spam yet (touch wood)