When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority. Within hours, we got a taste of what we’d only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough.
I love how the SEO industry pretends they’re anything but a caustic cancer leeching off literally everything.
“Oh, but discoverability of small business!” Yeah… I’d punch you if I saw you, SEO jerks. The Futurama movie was right.
SEO is like CGI. What you don’t like is bad CGI. What you don’t notice is good CGI.
There’s many abuses of SEO and many ways it’s used quite badly. What you don’t notice is when it’s done very well. It’s one reason that these days, a large part of the time the thing you search for is on the first page of results. If you know how to search well, SEO helps you find the things you’re searching for.
I know people will disagree and probably ridicule, but i’m not talking out my ass. I’ve been on the internet since 1994, and I remember a time when finding things involved sometimes scouring mange many pages of search results. SEO is one reason that’s less common. And I will say that search did indeed reach a peak and has come down a bit from there thanks to AI bullshit and things like Google’s bullshit about returning ads and prioritizing revenue over usefulness. But it’s still better with SEO than it was without.
Add that to the fact that best practices for SEO has of course changed over the years in ways that have also gotten better for end users in finding content.
And this is again not a full defense of SEO at all. There are many MANY bad actors out there trying to abuse SEO. But, again, that’s the bad SEO that you notice, not the good SEO that you do not notice. So THAT part of the “SEO industry” is absolutely caustic cancer, sure.
SEO is one reason that’s less common.
No it isn’t. SEO is about gaming the search engines to place their data ahead of everything whether relevant or not.
Yahoo was fantastic in it’s time because it was human curated. No SEO could bullshit a person reading the page and categorizing it.
Google was fantastic at the start because SEO couldn’t game the system. Google was famous in the early days for maintaining quality by keeping their algorithms secret and constantly changing so that SEO couldn’t break their search.
I’m speaking as someone who was first on the Internet in the 80’s.
No, you’ve got a point… Actually you’re right. To an extent.
I should have qualified my post.
But I’d argue the “bad” part of SEO is just too tempting. It’s clearly winning out, across the entire internet, unless you can look at me with a straight face and say “Google search is fine.” Or that discoverability of genuine services is fine. It’s definitely not; it’s a miracle any legitimate business is surviving from web search anymore, amongts the sea of attention scams and corporate behemoths.
In other words, the I feel like the “honeymoon” where we could trust SEO to happen ethically is now behind us.
You also have a point. HOW DARE WE AGREE. :)
Well, except that I think that - to a decent extent - the changing requirements for SEO generally have still improved it. I’m comparing to the days of keyword stuffing, which doesn’t work anymore, for example. Nowadays, it does have to be text that flows and is somewhat natural.
THAT said, I will myself point to recipe sites that give you a novel before the recipe for SEO purposes. I’m certainly not saying it’s perfect by any means.’
The results are awful though. Over the past few years, I can hardly even think of a single search where SEO quickly brought me to “the page I was looking for”; searches end in either a wall of spam, or me getting frustrated and more directly finding what I already know I want. Smaller sites I used to love have withered and died, buried from the lack of earnest traffic. Malicious URLs rise above the businesses they are copying.
In other words, what does it matter if SEO is “improved” if the results are junk? It’s clearly not working better, unless one’s a scammer, or a corporation that benefits from the consolidation.
I agree with this statement whole heartily.
Fuck that, bring back boolean operators!!!
¿Por qué no los dos?
yum
:) your interwebers journey began the same year I was born. I didnt join in these “dark places” tell about the year 2000.
Well, internet in 1994, but I was on BBSes from 1987. heh.
No harm in coming along later. You’ll get to see the cool shit (and… shitty shit) after I’m gone :)
haha😄 .
The majority of “new users” was bots twenty years ago. How was this news to these chuckleheads?
I mean it’s worth saying that the new bots are kind of a different league to the old bots.
Yeah, so it REALLY SHOULDN’T BE A SURPRISE
But now bots pass captcha and use a real browser. So… it’s not easy removing them.
Nah it sucked. I was on it. It was just lemmy but with less features and with less content. It was dead the moment it started because it did nothing.
I don’t understand how they even think it could succeed.
I didn’t even know it relaunched. They should have advertised it better. I would have checked it out had I known it was coming back.
I paid 5 bucks for a founder badge. I’ve spent more on poorer decisions but that only reduces the sting a little.
Right, but isn’t Lemmy itself a bit of a “less features” version of Reddit? I’m not here for features, I’m here to get away from toxic Reddit mods because fuck spez.
I’ll admit, I might have taken the bet that “reddit but not reddit” would hold at least some interest.
Kind of but decentralization really makes it up for it. Digg didn’t even have custom communities let alone decentralization.
I have my complaints with Lemmy but I was astounded with how bad Digg was. It’s like none of them actually used these community based apps.
People are naive to think there aren’t also thousands of bots here in the Fediverse.
If there are, theyre not very active
I tried using it and was kinda hopeful, but NSFW was against their TOS which is a no go.
RIP lemmynsfw.
It’s back as an archive and a new instance though.
What’s the new instance? I must have missed it.
Prude and ambicious. Executives these days…
Their tolerance of racism and bigotry was why I left
It seemed like every shitty person wanted to make it a far-right safe place
I’m glad it failed
those were the bots
I had interactions with a few, and they were very much the typical, stupid, bigoted yank
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It’s crazy how little I value your opinion
you valued my opinion enough to respond. I’d say that’s enough.
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haha
There was once a reddit alternative, namely voat, that started normal and became the most alt right incel qanon thing imaginable. Here’s a dataset with voat data and posts https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.05933v1
centrists Ideals are a bit more subtle some what a ballance of chaos Haha.
That reminds me, 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
Its good that you have enough self-control to hand over your keys when you’ve had too much to drink.
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Remember the Ron Paul mania on Digg?
breh why is this going around the net… 🥺gahat is this… 🤣
There were entire communities popping up dedicated to SEO and advertising. A lot of the spam would happen during the US night time, so they’d have to wake up every morning to sweeping away all the crap. Really curious on how they intend to handle the bots.
I was curious how they planned to monetize, but some questions are pointless to ask - all you’ll get are the responses prepared for maximal PR value…
I think I had read somewhere that they would eventually have ads, but that may have just been member speculation.
Maybe if they go down the Apollo route they could have some sub tiers, but we’ll see.
Man. I liked Digg. Not as much as Lemmy, but I liked it.
These things need to grow from grassroots.
They should bring back google circles
Unironically. But only on the condition they bring back Google from 2011
Didn’t you have to buy an account at Digg? If so, were the bots buying the accounts? And if so, who was buying them?
Ah man, I applied for the beta months ago but never gotten a response. For those who manages to enter how was it? Was it a Lemmy/Redit style or more like Instagram/Facebook.
I found it boring and mostly dead. Most links had a dozen comments at most, almost all of them very short and very few of them thoughtful at all.
They missed an opportunity there. Could have pivot something similar to moltbook.
MySpace reboot vs Spotify.
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