Am I a bad person? I just want one day without spammers trying to guilt-trip me into buying stuff I don’t need.

I have two podcasts and two radio stations. So unsolicited mail is to be expected. I have little problems with that, until the the people sending the mail continue try to solicit for a response even when I do not respond at all.

The final mail that made me snap

My response

Hello

I have decided to answer your barrage of mails. I don’t really think much of your services to be honest, but I will give you an answer based on experience and understanding of the subject matter at hand.

So, the question of the day is this: does search engine optimization really work? The short answer is no; it does not.

Allow me to build my reasoning here. I have two podcasts, one called “IT-säkerhetspodden” and the one you’re asking about “Flashback, tracks from the past”. They have very different strategies and results. Allow me to elaborate:

IT-säkerhetspodden

It was started in 2018 by me and a friend. It’s in Swedish and covers the area of IT-security. When it started, it had only two other competitors in the same area in Sweden. We hit it off to a good start already from the get-go. A few years in, I was able to get approximate listening from the biggest competitors. Then I compared to ours: we were 10% larger than the best performing competitor. In short: we were the largest IT-security podcast in Sweden. This is no longer true, as we are a bit behind in curve. We have yet to transition to the video format, and that is a problem today for an audio only podcast. But we can pretty much do whatever we want, with no significant loss of listenership. The SEO-angle? Pretty lack-luster. We have not even cared about SEO. No transcripts, no key words, no key word tracking and no description following any SEO strategies. A basic presence on social media (LinkedIn, Facebook and X/Bluesky). No titles optimized for anything at all. A dry website that only 6% of our listeners use. We live on the big podcast directories (Apple, Google, and Spotify). We still perform like the 1% largest podcasts in the world. This is because the curve is exponential. At 1000 unique listeners per one episode and week, we are that big. It says so little about anything except the overwhelming number of podcasts in the world get NO listeners. This is the sad truth. And no SEO in the world can change that.

Flashback, tracks from the past

Started in 2020 and has the format of playing chiptune- and demo scene music with short form narration by me. It covers demo parties (think digital arts festivals) and old games from the past. It has enormous competition. There are a lot of old CGM, chiptune and demo scene podcasts and stations sharing the small number of listeners that are available. Check terraplayer.com and see for yourself. It’s also a narrow (“drainpipe”) instead of a broad (“lake”) of a format, so to speak. It has had a dismal listening from starts as it competes with a narrow format in a totally saturated environment. And the scene has been set in its way for so long that it just isn’t viable to compete as most listeners already got their favorite spots since the early 2000s (long before podcasts, and when it was called “on demand audio). Yeah, I remember that. I started a now long-gone scientific show in 1997 (!) before there were broadband. So, to no surprise: it has almost no listeners. One month of all episode-listening, compares unfavorably with one (!) day of listening for one episode of my other podcast. I decided (unwisely, I know now!) to go full SEO gung-ho on this! I am a software developer by hobby, not trade. So, I read up on the problem and added all things you must have consistent tags, keyword tracking, transcription, the two worldwide supporter chapter namespaces in use and all relevant Podcasting 2.0 attributes needed for full SEO immersion. I started tracking key word usage with PEOSEO.com.

I am now months down the line and the uptick in listening, visibility and usage have been small. Noticeable, yes, but not worth the days and months of development and hard research has not been worth it. I am grateful for the experience, though. It was good to understand that SEO only works to improve an already well-performing podcast or website.

Here are two observations from me:

1. You should not compete

Another old curmudgeon by the name of Troed Troedsson taught me this lesson in his book “Don’t panic”.

If you want the listeners and then money, do not go into markets that are heavily saturated. That’s a lost cause. Sorry, no exceptions! If it works, it is because the conditions change. What was unpopular yesterday, can be popular tomorrow and vise-versa. This just how it works. No need to sugarcoat it or trying to sell a panacea for it. SEO can do nothing here. It’s not possible.

2. You must adapt

A very nice podcast that made an interview with me. They have video. Video is nice!

Today, video-based podcasts are more or less a requirement. If you still have only audio, you are not in the leader quadrant if I may say so. This was not so when I started. But the changes are there all right. Then there is AI and AI-requirements. If you leverage AI today, you can improve your chances somewhat. That’s just the rule of today. There are no ways around this.

Then again, who cares?

I and my friend have earned a pretty good amount from IT-säkerhetspodden during the years. We have interviewed the Swedish CEOs of IBM and Microsoft about AI years before it became the topic of the hour. We have talked with intelligence officers, IT-security gurus, and other people in the market. No SEO needed for that. I bought a subscription from Yoast for the site and learned to optimize the show notes for SEO. It did nothing for the visibility of the podcast and never showed a readable increase in the listening. It cost a lot of money and was irritating as hell for someone proud of being able to express himself with texts and articles.

And Flashback, tracks from the past is a lost cause. Who cares? I certainly do not. I have loved nighttime radio since I religiously watched “midnight caller” in the 80s. And now I present chiptune music and talk briefly about various demo scene topics for a small audience. Fine by me. I sure wanted more listeners, so I did the SEO dance and learned that all the promises were just a pocket full of mumbles, for so are promises. And I really come to expect that all I can do is to enjoy the process not some sort of pipe dream of “stardom” that cannot be the reason to do anything today. Timing is everything. And the time of demo/chiptune is not now. It was 25 years ago. This much is clear. I will continue working the recording desk for as long as I enjoy it, without expecting the non-existing chance of become some sort of influencer. What a stupid goal that is, anyway. The other pod can’t really give me that either. I seek no fame and not becoming some sort of brand name in myself. So, yeah, that’s the whole thing. The last leg of this journey comes here…

“Slkmediaagency” and the spam angle (UCE)

Right, this is the least funny part of the discussion. But we must go there. I’m in my 50s, so I have seen the whole modern IT-era unfold. Back in the 90s, I was a consultant and system administrator. I so the early era of spam. Hormel, the creator the Spam brand of compressed meat, did not like having their name associated with the annoyance that was unsolicited mail. They even had a page on their website stating that their product was Spam with a capital “S”. Unsolicited mail was spam with a non-capital “s”. If the purveyor of the least popular “food” you can eat wants nothing to do with you, maybe it’s time to listen.

Sanford Wallace, legendary spammer from days past.

Later, the spamming industry struck back with a new term called “opt out”., It simply meant “you receive our spam and tell us to stop” (unsubscribe). What a dick-move that turned out to be. But here we are now everyone thinks it should be the norm. And it is.

So why am I even complaining? Well, I get a lot of emails from people selling stuff to my podcasts and radio stations. I answer politely to people trying to get their music on them by noting we have no possibilities to play commercial music. Then there are all the “we can develop your website”-spams. I don’t ever respond. Most people use social media today, so websites are strictly window-dressing or maybe hobbyist projects. And then there is you. If you wonder why I haven’t responded, now you know. But you continued spamming harder with follow ups, while not knowing how easy they could be understood as mass-emails. My name is “Erik Zalitis” and my demo scener handle is “DJ Daemon”. So, my first name is NOT “DJ”. You are calling me that, which makes me understand that you are just trying to automatically spam as many people as possible, hoping someone will respond. And I do, with the only response I can give you: “Please stop spamming. I’m not interested!”.

You should have taken the hint when I dd not respond to the first five or so emails with incessant nagging from you.

I could have been rude, but I do not do that. I only observe that your aberrant behavior highly correlates with “dark tetrad” traits. I will leave the discussion with that and ask you to just go away now.

I’m going to release a new podcast episode of Flashback, tracks from the past in a few weeks from now. It will dig deeper in the concept of evil in videogames. I already have made such an episode in the past, but wish to focus more on organizations that grow corrupted even when they had the best of intentions. But I have not yet started, so I don’t know how to navigate those waters yet. However I have already decided on the last story of it: a fictitious organization that may could have existed in real life. One that started out with the best of intentions, but then became truly evil.

Here is a concept of it from my private notes (translated to English)

As I understand it, the idea was good from the start. Benevolent, even. And it actually still is today. Built on a strong sense of security and doing what is right to protect and to rectify and to form an opinion against society’s greatest injustices. The whole thing was started by a person who himself was exposed to the injustices that he has now come to want to protect others from. There is nothing but goodness in this, as I see it. With little information and nothing to go on, the obvious conclusion is that this is the right thing to do, even if it is controversial. But right from the start it was criticized and the responses from the organizers of the of organization were unprofessional and appealed to emotions and went to direct attacks on those who spoke against it. Angry words from those who set themselves up as a guarantor of a safer society. And those who complained did not get a substantive answer but the answers more implied “how can you think like this” or “are you on the enemy’s side?”. The criticism came because all ideas that are new are controversial. This type of activity takes time to become habitus (accepted by the public). But the answers from the organization are, in my eyes, a number of red flags. They feel more like demagogy than rational responses to the criticism that all new paradigms must always undergo. It was based on making the followers angry and despairing at those who dared to criticize, rather than actually explaining why the criticism is unjustified. An “us against them” mentality in general.

But we have to go back a few years when there were indications of the people the founder had strong bonds with. The reports cited links and direct references to local authoritarian organizations of the type that want everyone to see them as dangerous and very committed to drastic solutions. “Strong men who solve their problems”, one might say. And these men had logos with very strong and simple messages. These people are no longer visible in the organization. But the question is, have they disappeared, or are they still in the background? This is unclear to me. If I hadn’t known about this, I would have probably actually supported them. Which feels hard now, when I know that they may actually have other intentions than those they state. But this may be a misjudgment on my part. It may turn out that this will work out well. They have managed to change parts of society’s rules as they stand now and it actually looks good. Despite this, the given question is what happens next. The questions are whether those who may be in the background have a different idea of ​​where “the ship should sail” than the one stated as the purpose of the whole thing. And if so, are these purposes as legitimate as those we were promised at the start?

So many thoughts and so many times it has started well but ended in disaster. The Italian mafia was started by citizens who wanted to protect other citizens. However, that was not the outcome of this. Where did it go wrong? Were they started by them with dishonest intentions, or was the organization taken over by opportunists who were there at the beginning and who stood on the sidelines without seeming to want a position in it? Maybe they bided their time… Maybe it wasn’t even intended that way. At a later point, the lust for power took over. This is an interesting thought and I think of the saying “Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it”. This is unclear and maybe I’m worrying unnecessarily. But the fact is that it doesn’t concern me and it doesn’t concern most others either. So why is it even a problem? Maybe it isn’t. But I find it hard to see that this type of situation doesn’t have a big risk of going off the rails and doing things that the founders perhaps didn’t understand could happen.

Everything is up in the air and its activities are about to become totally accepted and then maybe it will stay there and continue to do good for society. But this is a risky path to take and the outcome of an unstable business that is very vulnerable to control and influence from those who see opportunities. It is clear to me that the correct approach is to wait and see, but not make any assumptions until more information is available. And there I stop my thoughts and move on to more relevant tasks this Friday at the end of May 2026.

Where is the podcast connection, then?

Let me show you where I started this discussion in 2021:

The episode is called “It’s good to be bad” and talks about villains that have a reason to be what they are and may not even see themselves as evil at all.

“So Tina Turner may not need another hero, but we need more villains! Interesting villains, and the retro games sometimes deliver the goods. Who wants another mustache twirling bozo who just wants to tie your wife to the railroad tracks? A proper villain has to have a reason to be who he or she is or we don’t want them. And here we celebrate some of the … ok… sorry for the misuse of the term.. “good” ones.” — DJ DAemon

So meet the villains of this episode:

Andrew “I’m right – damn the consequences” Ryan – Bioshock 1.
Donkey “But Mario is the evil one” Kong – The Donkey Kong series.
Sarah “I will bathe in your blood, but I’m the victim here” Kerrigan – Starcraft 1 and 2.
Robo “He’s just like Hitler” Hitler – Castle Wolfestein.
Wallace “Long, intellectual rant on why all is perfect and you suck” Breen – Halflife 1 and 2.
Shodan “I’m god, now you curl up and die” – System Shock 1 and 2.
(Ghost/Zombie/Whatever) Pirate “The incel of piracy” LeChuck – The Monkey Island series.

A few of my notes from the podcast:

“Look, I don't care much for evil for evil's sake. It's a boring and useless trope. And it fits for lesser bosses and the occasional end boss when the focus is not the evil and the villain. But a good villain needs a rationale, a drive, a motivation. Some are into greed, some are corrupted and unleash hidden flaws when life goes bad for them. Some have ulterior motives and no idea as to why everyone hates them. And some would have been good if only insert plot element here would not have happened. So today we go under the sea, into the jungle and among the stars and into the blood drenched walls of a certain castle. And we wade through the corpses and destroy the landscape to find the nature of evil wherever it may be." — DJ Daemon

“Would you kindly consider a bit of wisdom from yours truly? A man choose, but the slave of an idea has to obey. In Bioshock, you come to an underwater city built on the idea of total freedom. A dream of independence where the artist may create, the businessman will earn and the scientist is unfeathered by pesky rules and limitations to his experiments. The city of Rapture was created by Andrew Ryan who had the biggest of dreams, but as the city fell apart he could not accept it was a mistake. Thus he keeps the now insane population locked up in the city that is a complete battle zone. And Orion is an anagram of Ayn Rand, the objectivist, ideologist and author. The evil within Ryan you might ask? Well, mainly sacrificing everything and everyone for a pipe dream." — DJ Daemon

“And that concludes the whole list. We have the boring and uninteresting villains that could've been something with a proper backstory or at least some reason for them to be put into the game. But there are too many to mention here, so all I can say is we're looking at you, Professor Elvin Atom Bender from Impossible Mission. Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde, know the ghosts from Pac-Man. Sinister from Sinister. And Spider Mastermind, the end boss from Doom." — DJ Daemon

... And here is the episode itself

00:00 Flashback – tracks from the past – show intro
00:12 DJ Daemon speaks: Shiver me timbers, it’s a new name for the podcast. And today, we talk about pirates! <A pirate I was meant to be> No ships, no cutlass and no beer swilling on the tavern. It’s all about those pesky software pirates and the lamers who loved them…

00:31 BeaT of Osmosys – Celestial Fantasia
06:16 DJ Daemon speaks: So… Why are those that copy commercial software without permission called pirates to begin with? It has nothing to do with crimes on the seven seas. Actually it relates to the “pirate radio stations” of the 50s and 60s. Those stations were often located on ships, broadcasting from international water, where the law of the countries they targetted would not apply. When the kids in the school yards in the 80s started copying diskettes with commercial games, the term was re-used. But a pirate generally does not refer to the end-user, but actually to the crackers and the distributors. Let’s talk more about that after a relaxing tracked tune.

07:16 Xerxes – Marie
11:40 DJ Daemon speaks: Let’s talk piracy in Sweden. I once interviewed Pontus Berg or Bacchus as he’s called in the cracker group Fairlight. He explained that in the first years when Fairlight existed, distribution of commercial software without the copyright owner’s consent was legal. But diskettes with commerical games and applications were protected in order to make copying impossible. Groups such as Fairlight and Triad here i Sweden disabled this protection and also distributed the software. The industry initially begged them to stop, but then it became illegal, the attitude changed pretty quickly….

12:33 Jester of Sanity – Stardust memories
16:23 DJ Daemon speaks: In the early 90s, a lot of us geeks read the Swedish computer magazine “Datormagasin”. Issue number 16 of 1993 spread shock waves through the community, as “Jan Svensson” entered the scene. That was not his name, but he did exist. A pirate-hunter that preyed on those copying disks. There was just a problem: it wasn’t true. The article was kind of open about the true purpose of him, but the picture and the head line made a lot of people believe that he targeted teenagers copying disks with each other. In reality, he actually tried to gather evidence to convict big bulletin board systems selling illegal copies.

17:22 Skaven252 – The Goblin Returns
20:19 DJ Daemon speaks: Jan Svensson was described as a former “big time pirate” turned informer belonging to SIMP, a precursor to the Swedish organization “Anti-piratbyrån”. And in 1993, his work may have helped bringing down a big BBS in the Swedish town of Helsingborg. The sysop for the BBS called “Scandinavia” was convicted and had to pay 8000 Swedish kronas. That’s about $1300 in today’s monetary value. The thing that made them target him was that he charged money yearly for access to the pirate copies on his BBS.

21:17 Ahlin – Ps Deep Fantasy
23:23 DJ Daemon speaks: So why did we copy diskettes? For me and for many in my situation, we could not afford the games as we were teenagers or even kids. But that’s off course not a valid legal reason. So I don’t offer it as an excuse – rather an explanation. When I go my first modem, I actually didn’t pirate much at all and pretty quickly stopped as I didn’t really care about games and saved money to buy software instead. Not so much just an ethical decision but much more that i disliked the warez communities and their high brow cameraderie and self-absorbed attitude towards others. I respect the crackers, though…

24:15 Anvil – Path to Nowhere
28:39 DJ Daemon speaks: The warez-BBSes were the places where you could get the newest “cracks”. That is, the latest games and apps with the copy protection disabled. The word “elite” as often described by the number combination 1337 comes from same the bunch of people that saw themselves as the best of the best. But they were often shunned by many others. The warez BBSes required that you were recommended by others in the warez scene in order to gain access. This protected them from the law (or so they though) and made them feel special.

29:25 Laamaa – No use for a name
31:05 DJ Daemon speaks: No-one has better described the Warez doodz than legendary programmer Eric S. Raymond: “The cracker d00dz have a gift culture which thrives in the same (electronic) media as that of the hackers, but their bahaviour is very different. The group mentality in their culture is much stronger and more exclusive than among hackers. They hoard secrets rather than sharing them; one is much more likely to find cracker groups distributing sourceless executables that crack software than tips that give away how they did it.”.

32:19 Anvil – The Love Trap
36:40 DJ Daemon speaks: The last word on Warez Doodz is from the user Ozone Pilot : [BELONG] is the only word you will need to know. Warez d00dz want to belong. They have been shunned by everyone, and thus turn to cyberspace for acceptance. That is why they always start groups like TGW, FLT, USA and the like. Structure makes them happy. […] Warez d00dz will never have a handle like “Pink Daisy” because warez d00dz are insecure. Only someone who is very secure with a good dose of self-esteem can stand up to the cries of fag and girlie-man. More likely you will find warez d00dz with handles like: Doctor Death, Deranged Lunatic, Hellraiser, Mad Prince, Dreamdevil, The Unknown, Renegade Chemist, Terminator, and Twin Turbo. They like to sound badass when they can hide behind their terminals. More likely, if you were given a sample of 100 people, the person whose handle is Hellraiser is the last person you’d associate with the name.

38:16 Necros – “Ascent of the Cloud Eagle”
43:01 DJ Daemon speaks: Linus Walleij here in Sweden disagrees with mr Raymond. When he wrote his rebuttal, he was part of the cracker group Triad.

43:45 Jeroen Tel – In my Life, my Mind.
48:34 DJ Daemon speaks: I respect the cracker groups, but see the Warez D00d-sysops as way to self-absorbed for their own good.

49:31 Dr. Awesome – Aquarium – 16 bit
54:24 DJ Daemon speaks: Were leaving. Check our YouTube-channel for a discussion about the next song.

55:05 Walkman – Klisje Paa Klisje