Comment Spam

If you google image search best comment ever.
This  is one of the top hits.

Over the 5 years that I have been blogging, the landscape has noticeably changed. Early on, I would receive rare comments but they were good ones. As I built an audience I received more comments but rarely would I see any significant discussions like the ones you see on KevinMD or other smart medical blogs. About two years ago this trend reversed. My audience continued to rise but comments really began to drop off and I started getting more and more comment spam. I believe this transition was a direct result of the rise of Twitter.

In the last year I have been having repeated high quality discussions about posts, research and projects on Twitter. Online discussion, except in rare exceptions, has moved to Twitter.

Comment spam is robot generated text that tries to get published in order to improve the google ranking of a target website. I never publish them, though a a few may have slipped through. Here are some examples:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Coffee + MacBook Air = No posts for awhile":

Helpful information. Fortunate me I found your website by accident, and I'm stunned why this accident did not happened earlier! I bookmarked it.
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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "How do you go from an EGD to acute kidney injury?":

Apρreсiate this ρost. Will try it out.
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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "cyberNephrology, what a piece of cyberCrap--update...":

It's enormous that you are getting ideas from this post as well as from our discussion made at this time.
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Today I received the best comment spam ever:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Coffee + MacBook Air = No posts for awhile":

Do you have a spam problem on this website; I also am a blogger, and I was
curious about your situation; many of us have created some nice practices and we are looking to trade strategies with other folks,
be sure to shoot me an e-mail if interested.
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Comment spam going meta. Love it.

Update: Evan Williams, one of the founders of Twitter, newest venture is Medium, a content network that may exploit the movement of the conversation from comments to Twitter. Here is what Dave Weiner had to say about this:

Medium's strength appears to be the elegance and HTML 5-ness of its editorial tools. It feels nice using their editor. Like the content networks, being able to create content there is invite-only. But I'm assuming at some point it will be open to everyone, the way Tumblr or WordPress are.
An advantage Medium is likely to have is a connection to Twitter, which doesn't have a blogging system, and has recently had success with Vine. Twitter giving Medium a boost is good business, for the owners of both companies. ;-)