Scam the Writing Job Scammers

Or: how I am going to lamely get some kind of revenge on a couple of the scammer content mills who have made writing suck.

Young writers’ optimism usually should make a person feel good. But most of them are going to fail, and the ones who fail are often the good ones. The only thing to do about that is persistence, but the system or lack thereof is fucked in a million ways, so sometimes persistence seems like madness. Maybe I can place some guideposts to help myself and others make sense of the shipwreck.

Way back in 2006 or so, when I was trying to use my past career as a journalist to make money while doing the adult-student thing, I fell into a trap that’s apparently still out there: fake job ads that are actually collecting free articles for their content machines. The scam goes: “Write a sample piece to these exact specs to show us how gud you can rite!” Then you never hear from them, and your “sample” shows up in a Google search on some content-driven ad funnel. They’ve gotten more sophisticated, but it’s still out there.

These content mill fucks, I assume, know more about SEO than I do, since they clearly prefer the business end of writing to actual writing. (“Design, let’s spend maybe 500 grand…. content? Ah, who cares, let’s steal it from unemployed…