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.
Fuck that, bring back boolean operators!!!
Absolutely 100%. It is so frustrating to search for a couple of terms and have the search engine just ignore one or two of them, like no your stupid AI does not understand what I actually want please just give me what I fucking asked for.
udm14.com if you want good old fashioned, classic no-bs search back
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.
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.
Which Futurama movie so I can rewatch?
Bender’s Big Score, the first one. I was thinking of the scammer aliens, who have that same attitude SEO folks tend to carry.
Yes!
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.
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.
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.
damn you think they would have just used cloud flare click on the bus
Dead internet
theoryrealityPeople are naive to think there aren’t also thousands of bots here in the Fediverse.
The only thing keeping the bot population low here is that there just aren’t enough people here to be worth it yet. If the Fediverse grows they’ll come in greater numbers.
The Fediverse has a lot more safeguards in place, in particular the ability to require a message to register an account, such as my instance requires, weeds out 99% of bots.
We can also defederate from instances that become overwhelmed from bots if they have lax sign-up requirements (already happened a few times), which vastly limits their ability to take hold.
The bigger problem for us, I think, is the fight against bot scrapers. Anubis is keeping them at bay for now, but it will likely be an ongoing cat and mouse game until the AI bubble bursts.
the moderation and comment moderation history is nice but it is sort of hidden. that would be nicer if it was more intuitively inline. Also did you mean “bot scrapers” rather than “not scrapers”. And I have been toying with the idea, what about ai or bot supported pipelines, accept that they are part of the visitors, provide it optimized data, and then restrict ui/ux heavy processes to stricter rate limits per second, etc…sort of like a robots txt v2 or something
It’s also not as SEO-gameable (since fediverse domains are inherently more fragmented than a large, high-reputation domain for SEO algorithms to rank highly), and doesn’t have an inherent monetization system (unlike platforms like Twitter with their ad payouts), so that’s a couple more things going for us.
The only time I’ve even seen the fediverse pop up in a search was when I was doing some black magic nonsense getting Linux to do what I wanted. Yes it was a Linux community no it didn’t help.
Deleted by moderator
Fuck the anti-AI crowd is getting extreme. So much harassment and doxxing going on by these losers.
And it’s not even relevant, using an LLM to vibecode apps is completely different to using LLMs to make posts on social media. Just blind rage.
It’s linked in his public profile.
Edit: Speaking of blind rage, I hope you downvoted this accidentally…
I wonder if there is any inherent defence against slop on Lemmy. I guess if an instance doesn’t prune it’s user base of bots, shills and other slop merchants, it could be black listed by other admins of other instances.
No, but there is on PieFed.social. Mods and admins have functionality to check any post or comment for LLM-generated text. There’s more stuff too.
Generally I share my findings with Lemmy admins so they can ban the account.
I think this is a pretty big threat to the fediverse and social media in general and am taking it very seriously. At the moment the amount of slop is pretty low but we need to be ready for the deluge when it comes.
check any post or comment for LLM-generated text
Presumably with about the same tools that gleefully give false positives when checking school assignments.
This may come as a surprise to you so brace yourself.
I am not stupid.
Well, firstly, I’ve seen the Piefed code.
Secondly, I doubt it that you have some magical accurate AI-detection tools, and Digg and Reddit don’t.
That reminds me, 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
lol I still have a screenshot of Digg from when every article on the home page had this key in it.
Please share.
Straight off to jail with you!
For those who don’t remember this- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy
Thanks for the link I never remembered the numbers to know if it was for that or not…course been online long enough to know that’s the code (style) shown in comments. Was a lot of comments at one point.
My only unsureness of the code is cause I’m old and miss newer stuff so had to check to be sure.
I know about it, but didn’t recognize the code. So I assumed, they encoded some text to make it harder to read. So I tried decoding it.
Turns out, if you decode this in UTF-16, it turns into a japanese sentence
契ȑ璝寣䇘앖噣삈
Which means (according to DeepL)
The sound of the wind rustling through the trees
And now I’m confused, why.
That’s not Japanese, there’s some Chinese and Korean characters in there too. Turns out if you decode random bytes as UTF chars you will probably get a CJK character lol
OK, yes, that obviously makes sense, considering the amount of these Charakters.
Apparently you can get that sequence from an AI bot if you ask it “correctly”. But rules for thee and all that.
Its good that you have enough self-control to hand over your keys when you’ve had too much to drink.
Honestly, the first rebirth as a run-of-the-mill article aggregator was better. A lot of it I’d have already seen elsewhere, but occasionally it’d have something interesting that I missed.
Whatever they do, they’ll still be riding the name of a very dead horse.
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
It was just reddit with a nicer interface but the exact same awful users. There was absolutely no reason for anyone to use it.
those were the bots
I had interactions with a few, and they were very much the typical, stupid, bigoted yank
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.
Fedinsfw.app
Nice, thanks. https://fedinsfw.app/comment/102038
Prude and ambicious. Executives these days…
Not on my wholesome christian server /s
blaming? shouldnt they have celebrated how much people utilize their beloved slopmachines?
Dude an idiotic thing is one of the biggest sellers for dig was their stupid AI slop notifications that helped tell you what the article was about. I fucking hated that so much.
they are just hoping to datamine JUST like reddit to profit of its user, but worst. a corporate structure like diggs wouldnt eventually want to use AI so they can sell the data to GOOGLE, or other large AI to train on.
They had their own AI built in that summarize everything.
well duh, reddit/X/Insta, MEta,etc is infested by AI BOT/bot spammers for a while to spread propaganda or do things like promote links of OF, or other businesses. thats the other reason why they are very ban heavy as of late. diggs or any other platform would suffer the same fate.
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?
No you just had to request the account and then one would be provided to you when they open it up. I finally received my account a couple months ago. It was worse than it is here. I was hoping for some good alternatives to Reddit but overall Lemmy is only halfway there digg was only a third of the way there.
I tried it and liked it a bit. The problem for me was that it was very empty: posts about the same article had more comments in Lemmy than Digg. It also lacked many features that even Lemmy has. And, since everyone was able to create 2 communities, there were more communities than users. Most of them were created and forgotten, while others tried to get bigger with only 1 user posting everyday. The biggest/mainstream communities had less than 100k users each one. After some days, I joined Lemmy and never looked back.
They missed an opportunity there. Could have pivot something similar to moltbook.
OH NO! But how? They resurrected Kevin Rose for this! /s
