Digg is going away again, but Kevin Rose is coming back.
  • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    232·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4516·
      2 days ago

      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.worldEnglish
        633·
        2 days ago

        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.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        161·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          1 day ago

          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.’

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            24 hours ago

            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.

    • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      156·
      2 days ago

      The majority of “new users” was bots twenty years ago. How was this news to these chuckleheads?

    • zbyte64@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      22 hours ago

      Apparently you can get that sequence from an AI bot if you ask it “correctly”. But rules for thee and all that.

      • Anaeijon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        12 hours ago

        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.

      • orbitz@lemmy.caEnglish
        21·
        1 day ago

        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.

    • badgermurphy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      22 hours ago

      Its good that you have enough self-control to hand over your keys when you’ve had too much to drink.

    • dan@upvote.auEnglish
      16·
      1 day ago

      lol I still have a screenshot of Digg from when every article on the home page had this key in it.

        • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.todayEnglish
          1·
          18 hours ago

          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.

          • RR∆S®MinoriMirari®.Prod@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            16 hours ago

            aside from like, I mean I see your point there. I have been doing a little work here and there studying Quantum based keying and security. Even being one the more well rounded casual internet individuals with a greater technicality of understanding said stuff. It still scares me, if not more so being able to see when even my own capacity to keep up with it all that or even just the complexity of these new age Ai systems does get to me, not gona lie about that. Watching my own abilities to not just know but even the tail end of conceptual break down of not what exactly powers these things nor at what line they have or the validity of the Ai’s own thinking and its true or not understandings “those things I get and can wrap my mind around” But lately fully being able to keep up with i.e. I will give you one or so examples that does and even scares me half to death, because I not only have no idea entirely at said point, but what I do know is an Ai of such magnitude would supersede mine and likely the majority if not all human technical capabilities, stuff like Quantum cognition architectures are quite hard to wrap the brain around, and with Latent‐Space these days exceeding either parties full understanding, no Ai nor human can currently fully explain whats happening in some the latest or future conceptual GAi: generative Ai tandems of systems. They say blackbox, but we understand most “blackbox” atleast conceptually, some the newest algorithmic and multi modality systems though become any ones guess. I myself am just hoping at this point to keep up with Quantum related security protocols and possible insights on research into such things.

  • FistingEnthusiast@lemmy.worldEnglish
    414·
    2 days ago

    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

  • BlackLaZoR@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    They’re doing it wrong. Use crypto for login and charge user for every single resource used. Problem solved

  • lastlybutfirstly@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    1 day ago

    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?

  • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
    81·
    2 days ago

    Ladies and gentlemen, this is democracy democratization manifest.

  • etherphon@piefed.worldEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    One of the complaints I had about the place was how AI positive it was, I guess that explains it.

  • wabafee@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    2 days ago

    They missed an opportunity there. Could have pivot something similar to moltbook.

  • SwizzleStick@lemmy.zipEnglish
    16·
    2 days ago

    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.

  • reksas@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    201·
    1 day ago

    blaming? shouldnt they have celebrated how much people utilize their beloved slopmachines?