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It’s not that this article is bad, but it is what frustrates me about tech journalism, and why I started writing about tech. None of these people have any idea how the internet actually works. They’ve never written a line of code, or set up a server, or published an app, or even done SEO, so they end up turning everything into a human interest piece, where they interview the people involved and some experts, but report it with that famous “view from nowhere.”
Some blame Google itself, asserting that an all-powerful, all-seeing, trillion-dollar corporation with a 90 percent market share for online search is corrupting our access to the truth. But others blame the people I wanted to see in Florida, the ones who engage in the mysterious art of search engine optimization, or SEO.
Let me answer that definitively: it’s google, in multiple ways, one of which isn’t even search, which I know because I actually do make things on the internet. SEO people aren’t helping, for sure, but I’ve seen many journalists and others talk about how blogspam is the result of SEO, and maybe that’s the origin story, but at this point, it is actually the result of google’s monopoly on advertising, not search. I’ve posted this before on this community, but google forces you to turn your website into blogspam in order to monetize it. Cluttering the internet with bullshit content is their explicit content policy. It’s actually very direct and straightforward. It’s widely and openly discussed on internet forums about monetizing websites.
Just wanna say I’ve enjoyed reading your site! Thanks for linking it. I especially like the hall lf shame
Hey thanks so much friend. You should submit a hall of shame entry! We rarely get submissions and I agree it’s such a fun part of the site.
Oh, shit, a brush with greatness: I’ve read your blog before; you say a lot of smart stuff.
lmao thank you. That’s slightly strange but extremely nice to read.
Loading… if you can still see this message, this post probably doesn’t exist.
The link to your blog post seems to be broken.
What client are you on? There’s a known bug in some lemmy clients that break some URLs.
If you paste the URL into a browser it should work fine: https://theluddite.org/#!post/google-ads
Works fine here, thanks, interesting read!
There are some people that make 99% of the world 1% worse for the profit. The author lets them off the hook because “they’re just trying to make money”. As if having an understandable motive would redeem the “SEOs”.
Newsflash, it doesn’t. These are organized crime groups as far as I’m concerned. The law just hasn’t or $won’t$ prosecute them for the selfish damage they’ve caused.
If I have a society of 100 people, 2 start a search engine for the others, 1 starts an anti-search engine whose stated goal is to mislead the other search engine users while stealing profit from the 2 innovators who bettered humanity.
I spare no positive feelings for these pond-scum criminals.
IMO the problem really took off when smart phones entered the equation. When any idiot can get online with almost zero barrier to entry, then every idiot will get online. It’s why I like Lemmy; it’s not popular and the difficulty to access it is marginally harder than Reddit’s.
Once the Internet was saturated with idiots then marketing and monetization followed along. Capitalism is seriously the 5th Horseman of the Apocalypse.
I agree with everything you said, except I would argue that capitalism is the Sixth Horseman of the Apocalypse, seeing as one of the original four was already replaced during a translation. The original text were interpreted as “Conquest, War, Famine, and Death,” and the story I remember from my New Testament course in college was that in the early 1900’s, it was thought that Conquest was too similar to War, so they used one of the later passages that specified that the horsemen would bring death by “sword, famine, plague, and the wild beasts of the earth” to rebrand Conquest as Pestilence. In fact, now reading up on it from Wikipedia, apparently the first two horsemen were likely both supposed to represent war, with the white rider (Conquest) representing “righteous/justified war” and the red rider (War) supposed to represent “civil war,” which is interesting.
In fact, given how vaccines and modern medicine have dramatically lowered the death by infectious disease in the 20th century, it’s likely time for another rebranding (relevant xkcd), so I’d replace “pestilence” with “capitalism” or even “profit” if I were feeling flowery.
edit: Upon further reading, apparently the third horseman (Famine) could also be interpreted as a form of capitalistic excess, since it’s accompanied by a voice that describes rising market prices for staples such as bread and is carrying market scales. Traditionally, this is thought to indicate Famine as loaves of bread would be weighed during food shortages, but the accompanying voice seems to indicate that luxuries are still available, so I could easily make the argument that the passage is about the rich tending to their own needs while ignoring the needs of the poor (which sounds an awful lot like modern US politics/capitalism).
Edit 2: So I guess I’d rebrand all three of the riders preceding Death so that I’d interpret things as “Imperialism, Extremism, Capitalism, and Death,” or put a little more poetically, “Conquest, Discord, Avarice, and Death”
Those would be good App names. One is already taken…
I assume I’m just unaware of the others.
Comments like this restore my faith in the internet
Haha, I’m just glad at least some people enjoy reading them, since I can’t help but write them (and listening to my endless digressions down Wikipedia rabbit holes is exhausting for my partner).
In Good Omens Pestilence has retired and Pollution took his place. And if you haven’t read it, it’s damned clever and funny.
I have read it, but I forgot about that detail until you reminded me. I probably have to reread now :)
I’ve been using Kagi and I like it. It’s not perfect. It’s not great. Hell, it might not even be good. But it’s better than Google. And I decided I wanted to support a search engine that does not depend on ad revenue.
Now you’ve outdone Google.
Alright, calm down. If they “outdid” Google, they would have their own SEO dreamland platform. All they did was work within the confines of Google’s algorithms, A/B testing until something works. When Google makes changes they repeat. Overall the Internet is in a reeeeally shitty state due to the marketization of search results. There have been some things I have searched for whereby there were pages of what was essentially cloned articles. Many times I’m unable to even find what I’m looking for. Recent example, there was that article posted about that AI service / software that aimed to poison images, I don’t remember the name. I tried searching for the actual software / website. I gave up and never found it through the utter bullshit “articles” all spouting the exact same thing and clearly taking advantage of the “freshness” and relevancy of the tool.
Nightshade. They call it Nightahade. https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/
Ja that’s right, I knew it was a plant or something. Thanks!
There is a recent ArsTechnica article about that
Before reading the article: Is it the right wing fascist nutjobs that have infected every platform and space, destroying everything in their wake slowly but surely over the past decade?
oh
I mean, yes. It’s not like these corporate assholes are left wing. They’re capitalist liberals at best
They’re “prompt engineers” now :/
There’s barely any engineering or even editorial oversight going on with some of the AI content appearing now, just piping the output of an LLM directly into a blogging platform. The initial prompt themselves could even be just be scraped headlines from elsewhere.
Pais Ajit? Pronounced “piece of shit”. He broke the Internet allowing some traffic to get faster speeds than other such that YouTube can be fast but if you serve your own it’s slow.
They finally got around to introducing themselves.
