No wonder Reddit has turned to shit
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Most people [...] write [...] comments [...] and hope AI picks them up
Really quite sad if there's even one person out there doing that.
This is also as much of a grift as any SEO that claims to have cracked the code of getting to the top of results. Even if they have figured something reproducible, it will get fixed. If someone can manipulate a search engine to provide results different to what it would otherwise do, that's a bug they will fix
Will they though, search engine results lately seem very much like a decisive victory for the SEO slop
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Will they though, search engine results lately seem very much like a decisive victory for the SEO slop
only if u use google. Try Qwant.
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Most people [...] write [...] comments [...] and hope AI picks them up
Really quite sad if there's even one person out there doing that.
This is also as much of a grift as any SEO that claims to have cracked the code of getting to the top of results. Even if they have figured something reproducible, it will get fixed. If someone can manipulate a search engine to provide results different to what it would otherwise do, that's a bug they will fix
If someone can manipulate a search engine to provide results different to what it would otherwise do, that’s a bug they will fix
But there are more people manipulating the results, than people fixing the bugs.
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This comment made me realise that the internet could have been born, lived, and died, within my lifetime.
Like phone calls, and texting, bad actors ruin everything that they touch.
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And when that happens, we move instances.
I wonder if we could make only the sign-up page of Lemmy and Piefed public to the internet, and the rest only accessible through login and verification of being actually bloody human? Could use anti-scraping measures...
That's how it's been on my mbin instance (fedia.io) for a while now.
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Marketers and their bots have been using reddit to hype up brands. No wonder Reddit feels like shit these days.
The counter to this is a web of trust. You break the trust you are out of the web, and nodes connected you too are also out (for a period). And you need two to vouch for you
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If someone can manipulate a search engine to provide results different to what it would otherwise do, that’s a bug they will fix
But there are more people manipulating the results, than people fixing the bugs.
But not in novel ways. Lots of exploiters using the same bug. Fix it once and they're all fixed.
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Good actors too, it's the nature of capitalism.
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DDG is bing and definitely has the same problems.
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Marketers and their bots have been using reddit to hype up brands. No wonder Reddit feels like shit these days.
I don’t post there anymore but the only time it felt like I was talking to real people was on my small state sub. That’s the only reason I even lurk. Since I’m banned from Facebook it’s the only place to get the tea.
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And when that happens, we move instances.
I wonder if we could make only the sign-up page of Lemmy and Piefed public to the internet, and the rest only accessible through login and verification of being actually bloody human? Could use anti-scraping measures...
Lemmy also has an admin setting like that. Additionally there will be private, federated communities available in version 1.0.
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I don’t post there anymore but the only time it felt like I was talking to real people was on my small state sub. That’s the only reason I even lurk. Since I’m banned from Facebook it’s the only place to get the tea.
lol how did you get banned from Facebook? I haven’t posted there in years so I don’t know what’s going on there. Are they handing out bans like Reddit now?
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Even snail mail.
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Marketers and their bots have been using reddit to hype up brands. No wonder Reddit feels like shit these days.
I don't understand the point of this. Like, you figure out how to increase traffic on certain posts/comments and there's somehow a push for this? Do they get money somehow? These people always use terminology and ceo buzzwords as if it's some big business level that people are aspiring to reach, but what's the actual point? Why would I care if my post/comment exploded? Was I just using Reddit wrong?
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I don't understand the point of this. Like, you figure out how to increase traffic on certain posts/comments and there's somehow a push for this? Do they get money somehow? These people always use terminology and ceo buzzwords as if it's some big business level that people are aspiring to reach, but what's the actual point? Why would I care if my post/comment exploded? Was I just using Reddit wrong?
You mention your product in the reply and hope that some poor sap doesn’t realize it’s astroturfing and thinks they’re finding a really glowing honest review from a totally organic real person who recommended a thing they found that actually works
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And when that happens, we move instances.
I wonder if we could make only the sign-up page of Lemmy and Piefed public to the internet, and the rest only accessible through login and verification of being actually bloody human? Could use anti-scraping measures...
the rest only accessible through login and verification
Yes. If you can't fight the death of the www, embrace it! Help making it happen!
/s
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the rest only accessible through login and verification
Yes. If you can't fight the death of the www, embrace it! Help making it happen!
/s
I don't need one of those stupid ID verifications. Something else should be that instead, but what, I do not know. Whatever helps counter AI scraping and preserves anonymity.
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That's discord model.
Fediverse needs to have a layer which traps AI in a never-ending maze.
That’s the job of the web server, not of the application that runs on it.
There is already software you can get that feeds a never-ending maze of text to AI scrapers, some of which is AI generated and/or designed to poison LLM training. The problem is that these still use up a ton of bandwidth.
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You mention your product in the reply and hope that some poor sap doesn’t realize it’s astroturfing and thinks they’re finding a really glowing honest review from a totally organic real person who recommended a thing they found that actually works
So it's just a grift. Makes sense, they always use grift-style buzzwords. I was about to comment on the ridiculousness of building a business solely on manipulation, but then I thought about it a bit more haha. Thanks for the explanation.
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I think there are some differences that make the fediverse more resilient to this. For example, the absence of cumulative account karma keeps out the reddit style karma farming. The ability to ban whole instances also makes it easier to kick out bad actors. Instance admins could also implement their own rules like switching to an invite based system to reduce bot spam. Also it seems to me that reddit is actively encouraging this kind behaviour to inflate their user statistics and there is no incentive to tolerate this kind of spam for a fediverse server admin.
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karma is meaningless to seo outside of account restrictions. the people doing this as a job aren't doing it for imaginary internet points
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it doesn't matter what individual instances do as long as the largest ones have open signups
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