The people who ruined the internet

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.

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Does the author let them off the hook though? She excoriates them in basically every line.

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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.

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Just wanna say I've enjoyed reading your site! Thanks for linking it. I especially like the hall lf shame

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- 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.
  
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- Oh, shit, a brush with greatness: I’ve read your blog before; you say a lot of smart stuff.
  
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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.

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- 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.
  
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Loading... if you can still see this message, this post probably doesn't exist.

The link to your blog post seems to be broken.

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- 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
  
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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

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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.

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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.

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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"

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- Those would be good App names. One is already taken…
  
  I assume I’m just unaware of the others.
  
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- In Good Omens Pestilence has retired and Pollution took his place. And if you haven't read it, it's damned clever and funny.
  
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- Comments like this restore my faith in the internet
  
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While the author describes them as nice and sympathetic, literally every action described and every quote makes them seem like insufferable douchebags. Maybe the author...

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... is a typical TheVerge author?

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- Is this typical? I don't often read the Verge unless someone links it, but even the first paragraph already made me cringe a bit when they talked about "deciding to buy a plane ticket" or whatever idk the exact words, I'm not going to read that again lol
  
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The very fact of doing things like this was in the 00s something which would make your life dangerous. People really good at generating spam would sometimes get their legs broken, or walk out of their window by mysterious causes.

But then non-flat search engines and social media came into existence, empowering these fucks so radically that killing them IRL stopped being a solution, 10 heads would pop up for each one you hew down.

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The authors angle seems to be more of “hate the game not the players”, and even the they aren’t entirely sympathetic to all of them. The more that search engines became the main entrance to the web, the more that website owners would seek to get closer to the entrance, and the SEO people illustrated in the article are the result.

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Neither. Monetization is the cause. If the standard were still "your site is a hobby, you should expect to fund it out of pocket", none of the rest would matter.

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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.

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Nightshade. They call it Nightahade. https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/

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- Ja that's right, I knew it was a plant or something. Thanks!
  
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There is a recent ArsTechnica article about that

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Maybe people are to harsh on the author for their writing style. They tell the reader that they don't have experience in the field themselves but rather dipping a toe in the world that is SEO. I for one had no idea of the scale of the enterprise, figures they quote from years ago which make your jaw drop.

Obviously the people who work in SEO will make it sound like honest work. As long as there are search engines which got to have accurate results, there will be people trying to place their website above another one. High rolling SEO consultants probably aren't that concerned with the content they are promoting though, just the fact that it gets promoted, raising ethical questions.

As of a some years ago, I too noticed a decline in quality from search results. The face that Mr. Sullivan made snide remarks about it actually improving made me frown pretty hard. Between displaying the same spam website multiple times under different urls, literal bait and switch scams and literally impossible to find niche shit sometimes. I've unironically used Bing more this year then ever in my life, but mainly DDG for a good 5 years.

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SEO at least at one point was honest work. It generally involved ensuring that websites had a Google-friendly design and appropriate metadata so that it could be found via the right keywords. For example, for a place that made beer and wine in RandomVille and gives "wine tours", you might have keywords including:

Beer brewer brewing randomville Arizoba distillery tourism hops wine tour vineyard drinking alcohol

For sites that had db-driven or forum-style content, it meant going from URI's like

randomcatforum.com?cat=1&sub=22&post=9987

To something more like:

Randomcatforum.com/1-breeding/22-crossbreeds/9987-can_I_breed_my_maine_coon_with_a_skunk

This overall led to more legible search results when looking through one's history as well.

At some point, it also helped push the adoption of SSL as a preferred protocol

Unfortunately, over time "SEO" has become less about making site results optimized and more about gaming search engines, either to gain clicks and ad impressions but also for spammy or scammy sites

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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.

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They're "prompt engineers" now :/

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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.

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

Maybe I could even repackage such a tragedy into a sensationalized anecdote for a viral article about the people who do SEO for a living, strongly implying that nature was here to punish the bad guy while somehow also assuming the ethical high ground and pretending I hadn’t been hoping this exact thing would happen from the start.

He was the kind of tall, charming man who described himself multiple times as “a nerd,” and he pointed out that even though working directly with search engine rankings is “no longer monetizing at the highest payout,” the same “core knowledge of SEO” remains relevant for everything from native advertising to social media.

As sunset turned to dusk, I found Daron Babin again, and he started telling me about one of his signature moves, back in the ’90s, involving fake domain names: “I could make it look like it was somebody else, but it actually redirected to me!” What he and his competitors did was legal but well beyond what the dominant search engine allowed.

Unlike the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world, who went from geeky teenagers to masters of the universe, the dorks who grew up to do SEO have stayed the butt of the joke, beholden to the fluctuations of the algorithm, frantically pulling levers behind the scenes but ultimately somewhat hapless.

Google was slow to allow someone to talk with me, possibly because of the giant PR clusterfuck that has been the company’s past year (accused by the federal government of being a monopoly; increasingly despised by the public; losing ground to Reddit, TikTok, and large language models), so I decided to start by meeting up with a chipper, charismatic man named Duane Forrester.

Once he represented Bing, Forrester more or less stopped drinking at conferences, as had long been the case for his counterpart at Google, an engineer named Matt Cutts, who helped build and then ran the company’s web spam team before stepping back in 2014 and leaving in 2016.

The original article contains 8,379 words, the summary contains 336 words. Saved 96%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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Why do they being up the drinking bit and not elaborate or contextualize it?

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They finally got around to introducing themselves.

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