This Place is Going to the Bots
A human writer’s lament
Followers are fun, but it’s the writer with scads of subscribers who is really going to thrive. Subscribers are the folks so committed to reading your work that they sign up to get an email every time you publish.
I get, at most, a dozen new subscribers each month. And each one is precious to me. Whenever I learn that I’ve got a new subscriber? I celebrate!
I recently logged on to find that I’d gotten 10 new subscribers overnight. This never happens! Suspicious, I checked them out. Guess what? All but one were bots. (Thanks, Evolving Together, for being real!)
How can you tell that a new subscriber is a bot and not a human?
(1) Their profile is either slight or nonexistent.
(2) They often have the words AI in their name, like SuziAI or ButchAI
(3) They haven’t published any stories, or
(4) They’ve published just one story. And that story is about how to use AI to make money.
