“What is spam?”, 10 years later

I share a lot from Seth Godin on this blog and in emails to various people, but there is one of his posts that I share far more than others called “ What is spam? “

He published it 10 years ago today, and I fear that things have gotten far worse over this last decade.

The entire post is amazing, and quite short, so I encourage you to give it a read. For me, the first two paragraphs are the ones that I promote the most.

First, he defines spam:

Spam is commercial, unsolicited, unanticipated, irrelevant messaging, sent in bulk. It’s the email you didn’t ask to get, the junk in the comments that’s selfish and trying to sell something, the robocall on your cell phone from a company pretending to be Google Maps.

Next, he explains why it’s such a problem:

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.