The spammers and scammers are back. For the last few days, I’ve been getting a flood of comments linking to gaming websites. It’s all generic nonsense like, “What a great article. I had a blast reading it.”

It looks like they’re running bots that spam the internet with this meaningless garbage just to plant links that redirect users to their shady gambling sites and help them rank higher in Google.

It’s a mess.

The early days of the internet wasn’t free of scams either. I remember the first “chain emails” that were sent around to everyone. Sometimes it was about a Nigerian prince who needed two thousand dollars to regain access to his account—once he had the money, he would supposedly send you back $20,000. What a deal. Another chain email I remember receiving as a kid claimed you’d be cursed if you didn’t forward the message to at least five people in your contacts. Sometimes a virus was attached to it, other times it was just about a link in the mail they wanted you to click on.

Despite such scams, back then you could at least now that when someone left a comment on your content, it was a real person. Nowadays, most comments are automated bot messages sent from entire farms in India.

The more the internet gets flooded with automated content, the more the metrics for a successful online platform shift from raw numbers to the quality of your traffic.

What’s better? 1 million views a month? Or 1,000 real readers a year?

Obviously, it’s the latter. And the more these ridiculous sites use bots to promote their low-effort content, the more people will focus on the quality of their audience rather than just the number of views.