The people who ruined the internet
The people who ruined the internet
SEO experts got very rich filling the web full of garbage. But are they to blame or is Google?
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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.
Hey there, fellow political enthusiasts and furry friend lovers! We're Alex and Taylor, and we're on a mission to document our obsession with congressional apportionment. But, we're not doing it alone – our faithful companions, Nero the dog 🐶 and Scipio the cat 🐱, are along for the ride. 🚗
As many of you know, congressional apportionment is the process of determining how many seats each state gets in the U.S. House of Representatives. It's a topic that might make some people yawn, but for us, it's like a thrilling adventure!
This is art.
I was in tears of laughter while making it. I couldn't believe when they accepted it except part of me always totally expected it because they're fucking clowns.
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.
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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!
The internet needs search engines. Search engines spawn SEO. SEO enshittifies search. I honestly don't see how it could have happened any differently even if all the players were different. Search was essentially a solved problem by 2000, and everything since then had been an arms race between search engines and SEO. I'm surprised search engines have remained as useful as they have for as long as they have.
Monetization through ads certainly adds to the incentive to practice SEO, but even without it, people put up web sites because they want visitors, so they were always gonna have an incentive to game whatever search algorithms are most widely used.
The only way I know of for things to have happened differently would be the same mechanism that prevents traditional media and stores from being total crap-fests: having a higher barrier to enter and stay in the market, so participants who don't find a somewhat loyal customer base are forced out.
It's the same with AI everywhere you look. Doomsayers, haters, blind naivitet at every corner. None of these people know a cent of how to implement these tools, they've just tried the openai models which I'm pretty sure they're losing money on running but gain analytics in turn. The most frustrating thing about it, is they will state things that even the researchers haven't figured out yet, and state it like fact. Then they extrapolate wildly what it means