It started innocently enough. Over a year ago, I got a mysterious comment on my website from someone named Mary. “My friend just bought a car for $35234,” Mary proclaimed, “Isn’t that crazy?”

I didn’t know Mary, so her friend’s purchase did not strike me as particularly interesting. Just because I wouldn’t spend that much money on a car (unless it was going to make me feel young again, of course) doesn’t mean Mary’s friend shouldn’t. But wait… who’s Mary again?

I googled Mary’s comment and discovered similar ones all over the Internets. It wasn’t always Mary’s friend—sometimes it was Carla’s, or Bruce’s, or maybe Terry’s—and the car didn’t always cost the same amount. But the gist was always the same: someone’s friend bought a new car for some amount of money, and that was crazy. No email address, no links, no reason at all for sharing.

Weeks later, new comments started trickling in. “Nice site. Very interesting,” one said. Another offered the praise,”Great website with a lot of resources and detailed explanations.” And don’t forget, “Your website has useful information for beginners like me.”

Something was clearly wrong with this. If you’ve actually taken the time to look at this site, you know that it contains absolutely no information that anyone could consider useful—beginner or otherwise. And resources? Not unless you’re compiling a library of idiocy.

Of course, these aren’t just innocuous little compliments left by the occasional visitor. Each comment comes embedded with at least one link—usually pointing to websites hosted on converted oil platforms in international waters so as to sidestep pesky decency laws. Yes, that guy who thought my site had such detailed explanations was really just a computer with a tenuous grasp on the English language and a treasure trove of pan-species erotica. (Imagine the search engine traffic I’ll get from that last sentence.) And all this time I thought someone finally appreciated my “interesting comments.”

Aside from the annoyance of having to go through and delete such comments when they came in, this kind of spam amused me for some time. I wondered about the effectiveness of such thinly veiled advertisements. Are we so desperate for affirmation that we’ll unquestioningly accept any form of e-flattery, however obviously computer-generated it might be? That’s kind of sad. We’ve probably been this sad all along; having an Internet just makes it public.

The spam I get today is more direct. Most messages—and I get A LOT of them—contain link after link after link to gambling and adult websites that include terms whose meanings I lack the courage to infer. I guess flattery wasn’t getting them anywhere. Maybe that means we aren’t so desperate for attention after all. Or maybe “Mary’s” friends stopped buying cars and started hosting porn sites.