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How SEO Ruined the Internet

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Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#241

Post by DeathArrow »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #234
DeathArrow wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is because the ad revenue model. Not many people would pay for subscription and I don't know of other working revenue models.

More people would be willing to pay for subscription, directly or indirectly, if ad revenue model didn't exist. Otherwise, "free with ads" outcompetes all. That's why I'm in favor of banning "free with ads" wholesale.

I am not on a high moral ground to talk about ads.I am a web developer, yet I use ublock Origin.

Now, that I have some money, I am willing to pay for subscriptions, because that would mean high quality content, not because of ads. However, there were times in my life when I barely had what to eat and I barely afforded to pay for the Internet connection and paying subscriptions was the last things I was willing to do.

I suppose many of the 7 billion people living on Earth are poor enough to not afford paying for subscription.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#242

Post by gauravjain13 »

RobertoG wrote: post #104
RobertoG wrote: post #20

It kind of ruined content too. Why it ruined content? You are not the only one that is searching for the answer to that question. Keep reading to know why SEO ruined content. Many people think that SEO ruined content, in this post, we are goin to explain why SEO ruined content. When you finish reading this post, you will know why SEO ruined content. In the last years we have observed a grown in the quantity of conten…

I just searched (1) "SEO ruined content" in duck duck go and this Hacker news page is the first entry. We are very lucky that, as far as we know, an accumulation of irony doesn't create black holes. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=SEO+ruined+content&t=canonical&ia=...

Neat!

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#243

Post by eitland »

hvis wrote: post #167
mattmanser wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is, why is it doing this? It's not even suggesting both God of War and Lord of War, for me all the results on the first page are about God of War.

It's probably correcting people's typos, as well as saving a crap-ton of money this way (search results are undoubtedly cached).

At the cost of destroying their once in-its-own-league quality.

Today I use DDG mostly, thanks to Googles choices. DDG is equally bad WRT this but

- it is easier to move from DDG to Google (just add !g) than the other way around

- and DDG isn't as invasive

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#244

Post by stevekemp »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #125
RobertoG wrote: post #20

It kind of ruined content too. Why it ruined content? You are not the only one that is searching for the answer to that question. Keep reading to know why SEO ruined content. Many people think that SEO ruined content, in this post, we are goin to explain why SEO ruined content. When you finish reading this post, you will know why SEO ruined content. In the last years we have observed a grown in the quantity of conten…

Yep. Say I want a recipe. A tried and true delicious recipe. Can I search and just find a recipe? Nope. Through the magic of SEO, I now have to scroll through 15 paragraphs of somebody's life story before being able to examine the time and ingredients. How much time and energy was wasted on building "tag" systems? All those fun little term link clouds that sites used to have. I know I wasted time on it. I had somethi…

Even worse when you do find the recipe it uses some crazy measuring system!

What is one "cup" of flour? It obviously depends on how fine the flour is. Use grams! Use ounces! But above all use some kind of real measurement!

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#245

Post by krapp »

curmudgeon63 wrote: post #138
scollet wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't being rude, just increasing the sample size and reporting back. Perhaps we're witnessing SEO for different regions, regulations, and aggregate history of the two.

Intentionally? I'll assume good faith. Under that presumption, my best interpretation of that poster is "socially unaware, likely prone to nitpicky argumentation." The poster who said he was having difficulty getting good results from Google, was obviously venting about his own personal experience. Next comes along another poster who says "I tried it. I don't have your problem." Another post down, "... The problem yo…

>Excuse my outburst, but who the fuck says that?

>There is no upside here. There's an only a downside: being rude.

Says the person who apparently created a green account just to shit on my grammar and cast aspersions on me.

Pot, meet kettle.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#246

Post by vintermann »

RobertoG wrote: post #20

It kind of ruined content too. Why it ruined content? You are not the only one that is searching for the answer to that question. Keep reading to know why SEO ruined content. Many people think that SEO ruined content, in this post, we are goin to explain why SEO ruined content. When you finish reading this post, you will know why SEO ruined content. In the last years we have observed a grown in the quantity of conten…

We have the lyrics to the sad song you're singing right now.

That is, we will have them, once someone adds them.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#247

Post by vintermann »

nullc wrote: post #152
octocop wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is sooo true, every time i look for a recipe online it's all i ever see.

Don't look for crafting-ish instructions... the number of outright false farmed content is astonishing. "Here is this stock photo of something near, we're going to teach you how to make it!" {4 unrelated steps} {stock photo again} "Tada!"

And it's surprising how many sites that are half decent on its own, if you visit it without an ad blocker they still have Taboola ads about how person in {your location} got rich in the way they don't want you to know.

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#248

Post by brisky »

DeathArrow wrote: post #229

As I see it, maybe 1% of the web is not junk. I think we need an alternative search engine based on community vetting. I.e. you submit your url to the search engine but it isn't present in all search results until a certain number of real people will say it's meaningful and useful. You can do that by only showing it first in 1% of search results and ask people to rate it. You don't have to index 10 billion websites,…

Agree. If you would like you can read an article where I propose how such system could be implemented: https://medium.com/@TautviIas/it-is-time-to-create-a-decentr...

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#249

Post by [deleted] »

stevekemp wrote: post #244
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Say I want a recipe. A tried and true delicious recipe. Can I search and just find a recipe? Nope. Through the magic of SEO, I now have to scroll through 15 paragraphs of somebody's life story before being able to examine the time and ingredients. How much time and energy was wasted on building "tag" systems? All those fun little term link clouds that sites used to have. I know I wasted time on it. I had somethi…

Even worse when you do find the recipe it uses some crazy measuring system! What is one "cup" of flour? It obviously depends on how fine the flour is. Use grams! Use ounces! But above all use some kind of real measurement!

[deleted]

Re: How SEO Ruined the Internet

#250

Post by wizzwizz4 »

mcv wrote: post #94
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think AI is in any danger of taking over the world just yet. The scary thing about AI is that, even as the algorithms have greater and greater intelligence, we're still not much closer to teaching them to do what we want them to do. They can game the system better than ever, and then the universe is tiled with surgical masks.

So if AI ever takes over the world and kills us all, it will probably be because it failed to understand what we actually wanted.

If "what we actually want" even comes into consideration, we did orders of magnitude better than the current industry standard. (Poor consolation, I know.) Right now, the vast majority of AIs don't even have a concept of "human desire" – probably none of them, to be honest, though some that are good at manipulating their handlers might've come close to a particularly stupid dog's understanding. This is at the core of the Friendly AI problem: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intellig...

Just because we created the AI doesn't mean it'll care about us. That's like saying a maths problem will try to make your favourite number its answer, just because you wrote it. No, you are the one who must make its answer the number you want. It won't happen by chance.

Corollary: you can't patch broken FAI designs. Reinforcement learning (underlying basically all of our best AI) is known to be broken; it'll game the system. Even if they were powerful enough to understand our goals, they simply wouldn't care; they'd care less than a dolphin. https://vkrakovna.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/specification-gam...

And there are far too many people in academia who don't understand this, after years of writing papers on the subject.

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