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Apparently Google hates us now

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Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#81

Post by anigbrowl »

WarmWash wrote: post #58
phyzix5761 wrote: post #42

Why would Google need to direct traffic to the website when they've already scraped and trained their models on the data? Content creators and legitimate websites were wham-bammed and thank-you-ma’amed.

[flagged]

The difference is that I am not preventing anyone else from finding their content. I whitelist ads on sites that have good ad policies, like limiting ad size, labeling ads, and not allowing animated ads.

Advertisers only care about attention, if you don't impose editorial standards they'll contaminate your entire site.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#82

Post by kokojambo »

hamdingers wrote: post #54
kokojambo wrote: post #49

It appears for me when I search for it. Even Gemini is cool with looking for it. Here is a part of the Gemini result I got which was directly above the regular result link. "Pokémon Central is a major community network and independent Italian encyclopedia for everything Pokémon-related" Honestly, the title is super clickbait and it doesn't even reflect reality. Its so easy picking some giant entity far away and creat…

Do you suspect they have faked the search console screenshots as well? Make your accusation explicit.

[flagged]

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#83

Post by kstrauser »

anigbrowl wrote: post #73
hungryhobbit wrote: post #18

They're a wiki. Wiki spammers are relentless now. Source: a small wiki I help manage, for an obscure game with On a popular wiki, and it sounds like this one was fairly popular, I imagine even CAPTCHA's won't be enough to stop wiki spammers. If those spammers were posting more than just "buy my penis pill" garbage (e.g. they were putting links to malware sites), Google probably, and somewhat legitimately, saw them as…

Do you have any basis for saying that this wiki is overrun with spam, or are you just hand-waving? They were explicit in their Twitter thread about not being full of AI slop, and that they checked their list of pages that were marked as 'crawled but not indexed' and found no abuse. I understand that you were taken aback by spam attacks on the wiki you help manage, but it's not reasonable to generalize from yours to t…

AI slop wouldn’t be on my top ten list of annoying wiki spam, having been the one dealing with such things in the past. You can be free of slop and still overflowing with spam.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#84

Post by interloxia »

WarmWash wrote: post #58
phyzix5761 wrote: post #42

Why would Google need to direct traffic to the website when they've already scraped and trained their models on the data? Content creators and legitimate websites were wham-bammed and thank-you-ma’amed.

[flagged]

Users, ad-block users, and scrapers all consume the publicly-available content whether you like it or not.

I expect the difference is that the scrapers are the most likely to regurgitate the content one way or the other.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#85

Post by j-bos »

anigbrowl wrote: post #79
ajkjk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the dream solution is more like tree-based content: you see content that is vouched for by people you vouch for; if someone's account is compromised then their vouches get updated to not matter anymore, cutting their whole tree off at the root to make it invisible. Spammers should end up in largely disconnected components of the trees.

How does new content or content from new accounts get seen by anyone?

iykyk rules

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#86

Post by rastrojero2000 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #79
ajkjk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the dream solution is more like tree-based content: you see content that is vouched for by people you vouch for; if someone's account is compromised then their vouches get updated to not matter anymore, cutting their whole tree off at the root to make it invisible. Spammers should end up in largely disconnected components of the trees.

How does new content or content from new accounts get seen by anyone?

People search for a thing, find said thing, then share it themselves under their own name. You know, like how conversations work in real life

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#87

Post by anigbrowl »

One of the sad things about this story is that everyone has to read tea leaves to guess what reasoning might be going on at Google's end. Tech companies have normalized the practice of cutting people off with no explanation, or saying 'we investigated and found a violation' without articulating what the violation is. Naturally, they want to secure themselves against abuse and people trying to game their system, but refusing to provide any information does not achieve that.

It does infuriate legitimate users, enables other kind of abuse and scamming (eg immunize yourself against delisting with this one weird trick!', link farming etc), and act as a fig leaf for abusive behavior by platform operators. Effectively, we've allowed large teach companies to act as digital dictatorships with no accountability to their customers. Yes I consider users to be 'customers' even if they're uploading content or doing searches 'for free'. If you're monetizing their activity on your platform, they are your customers whether or not you call them that to avoid legal liability.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#88

Post by themafia »

WarmWash wrote: post #58
phyzix5761 wrote: post #42

Why would Google need to direct traffic to the website when they've already scraped and trained their models on the data? Content creators and legitimate websites were wham-bammed and thank-you-ma’amed.

[flagged]

You can run unblockable ads on your site.

You just have to not use third party integrations that run untrusted code on your visitors computers.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#89

Post by xp84 »

WarmWash wrote: post #66
xp84 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure most of those calling the shots at Google realizes they even have paying customers other than advertisers. Notably though, website publishers and consumers of their massive products like Search, Gmail, and Android are not really customers.

A bit outside of HN's typical domain, but I wonder the treatment that top ad buyers get from Google. Like if you are the VP of advertising for Procter & Gamble, and your nephews gmail account gets banned, are these guys treated so specially that they can get a white glove unban just like that? I wouldn't be surprised for Googles golden geese if they can

I wonder about that. Part of me thinks maybe they might not bother, because what are they gonna do, just not advertise? The entire online ad market is basically Google and Meta now. You'd get fired if you pulled all your ads because Google didn't do you a favor.

But on the other hand, I think they might definitely do that kind of thing as more of an old-boys-network type thing.

Re: Apparently Google hates us now

#90

Post by pbhjpbhj »

WarmWash wrote: post #58
phyzix5761 wrote: post #42

Why would Google need to direct traffic to the website when they've already scraped and trained their models on the data? Content creators and legitimate websites were wham-bammed and thank-you-ma’amed.

[flagged]

Users take part and improve wikis, it's the whole model. If they don't take the adverts, they still can contribute. Googlebot isn't making edits, not even giving signal to the site about what is useful allowing the owners to hone the site.

Two ways in which issues who have adblock are better than bots.

Users will promote organically, which can win more credence than even a higher listing in SERPs. Depends if your wiki is part of building a community.

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