When it comes to spam, unbalanced scale is a rapidly increasing problem. It’s bad enough when one person reaches out directly to you with an unsolicited offer, but when that one person can quickly send out hundreds or thousands of those offers, things fall apart quickly.
It goes back to a post from nearly a decade ago by Seth Godin that I’ve shared many times on here:
Some spammers will tell you that all you need to do is opt out. But of course, the very problem with spam is that it requires action on the part of the recipient, action that can’t possibly scale (how many times a day should we have to opt out, communicating with businesses we never asked to hear from in the first place?) People are smart enough to see that once spam becomes professionally and socially acceptable, all open systems fall apart.
I think we can all recognize how problematic it’s been for the last decade, but it continues to get worse.
First, we have marketing groups that continue to share “great tips” on how to evade spam filters and flood our email boxes with more and more garbage.
Second, there are AI tools that are anxious to contribute to this as well. One example (and I won’t share where it’s from), promises to “create intelligent campaigns that send LinkedIn connection invitations, automatically view, follow and endorse profiles, and send InMails and messages. All automated, personalized and with custom time delays.” Ugh.
Scaling has been a problem for years, and it looks like it’ll be getting worse. The good side is that real human connections, particularly in person, are going to get increasingly valuable as all of this gets worse, and I encourage you to lean into those types of interactions and relationships.
Leave a Reply