What We Say and What We Mean

I was thinking about religious groups that have active proselytizing missions - specifically the Mormons, but also the Jehovah's Witnesses and assorted Evangelical groups too. The stated goal of these missions is to win converts. However, I find it hard to believe that they're that successful at it. There's simply not that many people in a hostile world that would put up with being woken up on a Sunday morning to be preached too while thinking "Coffee gooooood".

A more important aspect of missions is to increase group coherence. Running into lots of hostile people is a good way to foster an us-versus-them mentality, which should protect against defections.

My point is not to argue that one or the other is more important - I'm sure they both are. What I want to know is if the leadership of the groups acknowledges the importance of fostering group coherence. When talking amongst themselves, do they say "we know we don't get many converts, that's not the point. The point is to make the missionaries more afraid of the outside world".

A LJ Mystery

So some of you have noticed that utilogo has been friending people of late. It's a bit of a mystery because their friends list contains (as of this posting) 209 people (for perspective, I have about 70). Of those, 23 are on my friends list and another 13 are people I know of, but haven't friended (sometimes these are fellow SCAdians I just don't know that well, others are just familiar LJ handles that I've seen here and there, but don't know the people behind them).

The weird thing is who was friended and who was not. It's like someone took a random sampling of my f-list and added them willy-nilly. Some of the people have no obvious connection to others except through me. For example, there's a bunch of SCAdians on the list but _grog_ is on the list too. She doesn't have anything to do with the SCA, so it's not obviously looking for SCAdians.

There's enough people I know on the list that, if it's a real person, I'd be shocked if I hadn't at least met the person casually.

But then there's all those names I don't know. The vast majority of the people friended are completely unknown to me.

This leads to a couple of possibilities:

1) It's a real person, with completely normal motives who's just shy about letting people know who they are.

2) It's a real person who is using a semi-anonymous account to keep track of some sub-set of their friends list. In this case it's likely that the person in question has another LJ account that their more active with.

3) It's some form of malware. Either a currently inactive spammer, or some kind of data-miner. In either case I'd expect the account to erupt some way in the future.

Complicating matters is the fact that it's been a month since the account was activated and they've posted (friends only) at least 20 times. I'd suspect a spambot to have recruited a lot more people and to not have bothered making posts. snooness: I notice you've friended them back - any hints?

utilogo has not friended me, so I find it more of an intellectual exercise then a concern.

The whole issue does suggest a few things:

1) You could target spam on LJ using interests. A reasonable data miner could come up with email addresses for people with shared interests. Send a Viagra ad to everyone who lists "SCA" and "sex" as an interest with the subject line "Show your lady that your sword stands ready" might pique more interest then "C4EAP V1AGRA N0W".

(aside: I got a cam whore ad the other day that I didn't immediately delete. It used my proper first name in the subject line which suggests that the bot in question figured out what my first name was. This is much better then the ones that use my LJ/hotmail handle. Nobody I know would actually call me "quixote317" in that context)

2) You might be able to programatically figure out who utilogo was by scanning the friends lists of everyone on their friends list to find the smallest set of handles that includes everyone on the list. The common denominator of those friends lists would be the person you're after. This method could work for any cyranoid account (where the user's intent is to look at their current LJ friends list anonymously). Ideally the app would simply return a list of LJ handles in answer to the question "Who's friends list is most similar to user X?", which is a more precise statement of the problem.