Is that what you want to do? Or do you want to make money by making something that people value?
People value all sorts of ridiculous things like homeopathic "remedies", psychic readings, and bullshit seeds on Farmville, how are those any better than spamming or content farming? I'd argue that the first two, at least, are far worse.
For that matter, how is the threshold of "acceptable value" set so that we don't similarly condemn, Facebook or 37Signals or SEO firms, for doing work of much less value than say, drug discovery or computer security -- especially when these are all within reach of the same CS grads?
Do Google's adwords count as creating value? Because they're how it makes it's money, search -- which creates value -- is just used to bring people in. If that separation of value creation/profit is all right, then is it okay to make millions spamming and give it to an efficient charity (as below)? If not, why not?
You're substantially raising the cost of using an essential business communication tool (email). Is that not harmful?
> People value all sorts of ridiculous things like homeopathic "remedies", psychic readings, and bullshit seeds on Farmville, how are those any better than spamming or content farming? I'd argue that the first two, at least, are far worse.
Consent makes all the difference (cue BDSM jokes). You have to make a decision to play Farmville to be harmed by it; spam drains the money and time of everyone.
Your goal should not be to create something of negligible value, and extract far more than value than you created simply by doing everything you can to shovel other people's money into your pockets.
Some algorithms are greedy - they maximize their returns at every step, without caring about future returns. Greedy algorithms are not the most effective.
Parasitism is very efficient for the parasite. Don't seek just to make money efficiently, or you'll end up a parasite. Instead look to create value as efficiently as possible.
Suppose you spam your way to a million dollars selling fake Viagra. You have created no value. Your customers have all wasted their time. You've also wasted 100x the time of people who didn't buy. There's more waste in computing capacity and bandwidth, plus the time sysadmins spend fighting and cleaning up after. The resources spent hosting and sending the spam were wasted, plus the time and resources spent making fake pills and fake packages.
The general rule of thumb for business is 10% profit on expenses, so let's assume you had to burn $10m of your own resources to make your $1m. Spamming, though, mainly shifts costs elsewhere. Guessing a 5:1 ratio, let's say you wasted $60m to make $1m.
If we suppose that you're a generous parasite, you'll give 10% to charity, 100k. 25% overhead is very good for charities, so we'll say $75k of resources end up improving the world out of the $60m you wasted. Rather than being "hundreds of time more efficient", you're closing in on 100x worse.
Just talked to my friend who was one of the top spammers in the world. It only takes about 3 or 4M emails to bypass the spam filter for a spammer to make $1M. You're vastly exaggerating the wasted resources in terms of sending these emails, the money spent by customers, the time wasted by people receiving these emails, and the productivity lost by the workers.
$100k given to a charity like VillageReach (http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/villager...) on the other hand, will avert 100 infant deaths.