- brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish4 days
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.
- 4 days
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.
- Blue_Morpho@lemmy.worldEnglish4 days
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.
- SirEDCaLot@lemmy.todayEnglish3 days
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.
- brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish4 days
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.
- SpaceNoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish4 days
The majority of new users was bots twenty years ago. How was this news to these chuckleheads?
- TheFogan@programming.devEnglish4 days
I mean it’s worth saying that the new bots are kind of a different league to the old bots.
- panda_abyss@lemmy.caEnglish4 days
But now bots pass captcha and use a real browser. So… it’s not easy removing them.
- brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish3 days
Bender’s Big Score, the first one. I was thinking of the scammer aliens, who have that same attitude SEO folks tend to carry.
3 daysThat reminds me, 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
- SirEDCaLot@lemmy.todayEnglish3 days
Straight off to jail with you!
For those who don’t remember this- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy
- orbitz@lemmy.caEnglish3 days
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.
- 3 days
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.
- pipe01@programming.devEnglish2 days
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
- 1 day
OK, yes, that obviously makes sense, considering the amount of these Charakters.
lol I still have a screenshot of Digg from when every article on the home page had this key in it.
- 3 days
Did they really demand a key be removed like . Ehhh this why you should use cryptographic tokenization, non static securities… . Ehhh lol.
- SirEDCaLot@lemmy.todayEnglish3 days
Yup.
The problem is, how do you guarantee access control that works offline?DVD DRM was based on a pretty simple system that was easy to crack.
HD-DVD (former blu-ray competitor) DRM was more advanced. Someone hacked a software player and extracted its decode key, which this was.
The DRM was designed to be updateable so any discs manufactured after this leak would use different keys (and anyone using the software app that’d been hacked would need an update). That didn’t stop this key from working on every disc in existence at the time.That’s the problem with making software decoding available. It had to work offline, so you could have an authorized player software, and feed it any valid disk, and it’d Just Work. So even if you put a crypto enclave in the drive controller, the player software still needs its own way to authenticate itself to the drive.
- badgermurphy@lemmy.worldEnglish3 days
Its good that you have enough self-control to hand over your keys when you’ve had too much to drink.
- 3 days
breh why is this going around the net… 🥺gahat is this… 🤣
- SirEDCaLot@lemmy.todayEnglish3 days
- Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish4 days
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.
- Psythik@lemmy.worldEnglish4 days
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.
Yeah, same. What I found weird is that they couldn’t even send a freaking message. No “hey, we’re shutting down”, and I guess some people will be annoyed because they lost their saved stuff.
- BigJohnnyHines@lemmy.caEnglish4 days
People are naive to think there aren’t also thousands of bots here in the Fediverse.
- 4 days
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.
- 3 days
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
- 4 days
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.
- 4 days
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.
- XLE@piefed.socialEnglish4 days
According to your Reddit history, you’re a huge fan of building these bots… Or are you more of a “slop for thee but not for me” guy?
- 4 days
For someone who likes digging around in my Reddit history you’d think you’d be able to find something that was actually relevant to the topic at hand. That was a comment about the uses of agentic coding tools for making custom applications, not about building bots.
- 4 days
Yeah, well, I judge you for participating in all those scat and cuck subreddits.
DISCLAIMER: This is a joke. I haven’t stalked them on reddit. Just being silly and want that to be clear. :)
- saltesc@lemmy.worldEnglish4 days
Stop being a weirdo or go start a tech company so your behaviour is at least expected.
- lumpenproletariat@quokk.auEnglish4 days
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.
- Iconoclast@feddit.ukEnglish4 days
This particular user is a special kind of one. Once you make the wrong noises about something they don’t like, they make it their personal mission to start digging for anything even remotely looking like dirt that they can sling your way - as they’re now demonstrating below.
- XLE@piefed.socialEnglish4 days
It’s linked in his public profile.
Edit: Speaking of blind rage, I hope you downvoted this accidentally…
- IcePee@lemmy.beru.coEnglish4 days
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.
My instance bans non-consensual AI content and users. Rimu’s tools have made that a lot easier to do, I get an alert when the system detects a possible AI user.
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.
- 4 days
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.
- 4 days
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.
- reksas@sopuli.xyzEnglish3 days
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.
- Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish3 days
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.
- 4 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
- 3 days
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
- 4 days
I had interactions with a few, and they were very much the typical, stupid, bigoted yank
- Sat@lemmy.worldEnglish4 days
I tried using it and was kinda hopeful, but NSFW was against their TOS which is a no go.
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.
I guess. I don’t use Reddit’s AI. But Digg specifically billed itself as Reddit + AI. I got early beta access, and it was exactly that: Reddit + shitty AI summaries.
- Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish4 days
If it was, it was a bad stratagy.
AI is the only industry that is somehow nonprofitable, without customers, and yet also propping up the economy right now.
Just waiting for this stupid bubble to pop
- ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zipEnglish4 days
I mean, reddit only got big because Digg made some very stupid moves before, so … pretty on brand
- 4 days
Reddit was doing fine before the influx from Digg. That’s one of the reasons people migrated to reddit in the first place - because it was already viable. That said, it was an influx of users, for sure.
- W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish4 days
I liked Digg right up until they folded like a cheap suit over the HD DVD decryption key.
- MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish4 days
folded like a cheap suit
Funnier because of all the T-shirts printed with that key on them.
- HeyMrDeadMan@lemmy.worldEnglish4 days
Going off memory here, but I’m pretty sure someone posted the master decryption key, without any context. Just, ‘123cf7’…etc.
Without any context, it’s just a random string of letters and numbers. Absolutely free speech. With context, it’s a violation of the DMCA.
- W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish1 day
Yes, and Digg removed it as quickly as they could before realizing you can’t stop the signal.
- ApollosArrow@lemmy.worldEnglish4 days
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.
One of the complaints I had about the place was how AI positive it was, I guess that explains it.
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.
It was basically exactly Reddit but with two noticeable AI features that were easy to ignore:
- An AI-generated summary of popular posts on the homepage
- Underneath every link post to an article was an AI summary, but on the app it was a collapsible section so collapsing it in one post would keep it collapsed for all.
I found the second one slightly handy, though, because when I was on Reddit I fell into the bad habit of posting after just reading headlines. With the AI summaries I could get more context and it often lead me to opening more articles than I would have without it.
- 4 days
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.
