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Dogs, Bots and Blogs:

A content creation horror story

This is a long one, but my mind can only contain so much madness.

So yours truly decided to start an online presence.

I want to write and be a creative as a vocation, and it was time for me to build the bridges that would connect me to an audience.

My first bridge was built Wordpress, where I'm uploading a web serial currently. It's not terrible, check it out.

Degenerate self-promotion aside, I was quite excited to see who my first subscribers were, people who got to me through the Wordpress Reader, the feed of all the posts made in the platform.

A couple of human-seeming accounts, they had that soulful controlled randomness to them, along with the kindness to give my stuff a chance. I checked their blogs back, until I stumbled on a particularly canine one.

A pomeranian blog.

Nothing but.

I have considered against outright saying the name of the blog or the name that the creator goes by because 1, saying their names might bring more power unto them and 2, I don't want to be cruel.

It's carnage trying to get the blind behemoth of the internet to set its eyes on your content. As long as their methods are not malicious, I am hard pressed to judge someone for how they do the grind. That's why I'm also pasting screenshots that are not too revealing.

It's all gray.

(This is all true for how creepypasta it sounds. I swear to god.)

But yeah, pomeranians.

Pom-poms galore.

The blog howled till its chords were raw about the beauty and caretaking needs of the dog breed, to a point of an almost hypnotic suggestion of it's necessity.

Odd, but garden-variety odd. The internet has seen wilder bursts. I thought that until I took a closer look at the furballs.

Like stuck between mediums, not quite a photograph and not quite a digital painting. Both too blurry and too sharp.

Artificially generated images.

A fraction more odd to my expectation, but still adhering to logic in function.

I can perfectly picture a Pomeranian enthusiast, with unbridled energy and capacity for writing of the children of the German Spitz, but incapable of illustrating their texts on their own. Perhaps wanting to avoid the legal headache of copyright with their incomplete understanding of it, they turn to AI (which is a copyright nightmare of its own, but I digress) in order to get their images.

Cut and dry.

But I wanted the character I had conjured to be real, their love for Pomeranians real, so I checked the posts' content.

I'm not an expert, but the text does have a mechanistic aftertaste to it. Huge amounts of fluff (heh) with aimlessly vague topics. No citations of experts of any kind. No personal experiences with their own pom puppies. No typos.

You've got around 3500 words a post, putting them in a word counter. So, how many posts?

20 PAGES OF 10 POSTS EACH?!

(What are they looking at?)

(There's nothing particular about their eyes.)

This is the first post. No "Welcome to my blog!" post or "This is why I love poms so much" post or "You're pet too, aren't you?" post, but an article about poms alerting impending seizures.

I'm writing this on the 13th of August (Why does that sound like a last captain's log?). 52 days since their last post.

200 posts in 52 days. Approximately seventy thousand words in honor of the breed, like warm drops spilled at a stone altar. This is definitely automated to crap.

There's no heart pumping blood that is creating this.

It's necessarily something else.