Internet Quality and Socialbots

I have been posting on Mondays and Thursdays for a while, but I am going to go to one post per week on Mondays.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  First of all, I want to better focus my time on a couple of books I have underway.  The  books have to do with creativity and innovation when very large numbers of people are involved (governments, religions, nations, etc) and the advantages of working with the hands.  Secondly, I need to spend some time thinking about how I can best take advantage of the internet.  In order to do this, I need to learn more about the internet and the directions it is taking.

 Networking is obviously a work in progress, and faces continual problems. I am a user, but not aware enough of the pitfalls involved.  For instance I did not know about socialbots and the increasing resources going into their development. An article in the  New York Times of August 11, 2013, entitled "I Flirt and Tweet.  Follow Me at #Socialbot" by Ian Urbina is here, if you haven’t seen it.  It describes the increasing sophistication and use of software robots to communicate with people on social networking sites for various reasons, varying from marketing through politics to attempts to annoy them or push various causes.  The article claims that more than half of Web traffic is from non-humans.  But messages composed by non-humans are increasing in the social networking area.  Some researchers are estimating that only 35% of the followers of the average Twitter user are real people, and estimate that within two years, 10% of  all social networking traffic will be by bots masquerading as real people.

 Apparently many of these bots have been provided with real social networking accounts and the article contains entertaining and worrisome examples of their power.  One quotes  Christian Rudder, manager and cofounder of OkCupid, a dating site.  Apparently at one point, his group bought and redesigned a smaller dating site.  The result was a sizeable drop of non-human participants, but also a 15% drop in real human users,  because the robot participants provided a major amount of flirtatiousness and romance.  The article mentions that his programmers are trying to design bots which will flirt with socialbots joining his site and lure them away to another location.  

 And I need to think harder about who I really want to communicate with.

 But I will continue to babble on Mondays.