this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 227 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (12 children)

When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority. Within hours, we got a taste of what we'd only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn't appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they'd find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough.

I love how the SEO industry pretends they’re anything but a caustic cancer leeching off literally everything.

“Oh, but discoverability of small business!” Yeah… I’d punch you if I saw you, SEO jerks. The Futurama movie was right.

[–] daychilde@lemmy.world 29 points 4 days ago (5 children)

SEO is like CGI. What you don't like is bad CGI. What you don't notice is good CGI.

There's many abuses of SEO and many ways it's used quite badly. What you don't notice is when it's done very well. It's one reason that these days, a large part of the time the thing you search for is on the first page of results. If you know how to search well, SEO helps you find the things you're searching for.

I know people will disagree and probably ridicule, but i'm not talking out my ass. I've been on the internet since 1994, and I remember a time when finding things involved sometimes scouring mange many pages of search results. SEO is one reason that's less common. And I will say that search did indeed reach a peak and has come down a bit from there thanks to AI bullshit and things like Google's bullshit about returning ads and prioritizing revenue over usefulness. But it's still better with SEO than it was without.

Add that to the fact that best practices for SEO has of course changed over the years in ways that have also gotten better for end users in finding content.

And this is again not a full defense of SEO at all. There are many MANY bad actors out there trying to abuse SEO. But, again, that's the bad SEO that you notice, not the good SEO that you do not notice. So THAT part of the "SEO industry" is absolutely caustic cancer, sure.

[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 65 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

SEO is one reason that's less common.

No it isn't. SEO is about gaming the search engines to place their data ahead of everything whether relevant or not.

Yahoo was fantastic in it's time because it was human curated. No SEO could bullshit a person reading the page and categorizing it.

Google was fantastic at the start because SEO couldn't game the system. Google was famous in the early days for maintaining quality by keeping their algorithms secret and constantly changing so that SEO couldn't break their search.

I'm speaking as someone who was first on the Internet in the 80's.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

No, you've got a point... Actually you're right. To an extent.

I should have qualified my post.

But I'd argue the "bad" part of SEO is just too tempting. It's clearly winning out, across the entire internet, unless you can look at me with a straight face and say "Google search is fine." Or that discoverability of genuine services is fine. It's definitely not; it's a miracle any legitimate business is surviving from web search anymore, amongts the sea of attention scams and corporate behemoths.

In other words, the I feel like the "honeymoon" where we could trust SEO to happen ethically is now behind us.

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[–] rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world 32 points 3 days ago (6 children)

That reminds me, 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 27 points 3 days ago (3 children)
[–] Anaeijon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I know about it, but didn't recognize the code. So I assumed, they encoded some text to make it harder to read. So I tried decoding it.

Turns out, if you decode this in UTF-16, it turns into a japanese sentence

契ȑ璝寣䇘앖噣삈

Which means (according to DeepL)

The sound of the wind rustling through the trees

And now I'm confused, why.

[–] pipe01@programming.dev 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That's not Japanese, there's some Chinese and Korean characters in there too. Turns out if you decode random bytes as UTF chars you will probably get a CJK character lol

[–] Anaeijon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago

OK, yes, that obviously makes sense, considering the amount of these Charakters.

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[–] dan@upvote.au 17 points 3 days ago (4 children)

lol I still have a screenshot of Digg from when every article on the home page had this key in it.

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[–] zbyte64@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago

Apparently you can get that sequence from an AI bot if you ask it "correctly". But rules for thee and all that.

[–] badgermurphy@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Its good that you have enough self-control to hand over your keys when you've had too much to drink.

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Dead internet ~~theory~~ reality

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 58 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Nah it sucked. I was on it. It was just lemmy but with less features and with less content. It was dead the moment it started because it did nothing.

I don't understand how they even think it could succeed.

[–] Katana314@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Right, but isn't Lemmy itself a bit of a "less features" version of Reddit? I'm not here for features, I'm here to get away from toxic Reddit mods because fuck spez.

I'll admit, I might have taken the bet that "reddit but not reddit" would hold at least some interest.

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Kind of but decentralization really makes it up for it. Digg didn't even have custom communities let alone decentralization.

[–] Sl00k@programming.dev 4 points 3 days ago

I have my complaints with Lemmy but I was astounded with how bad Digg was. It's like none of them actually used these community based apps.

[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I didn't even know it relaunched. They should have advertised it better. I would have checked it out had I known it was coming back.

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[–] AgentBoom@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

I tried it and liked it a bit. The problem for me was that it was very empty: posts about the same article had more comments in Lemmy than Digg. It also lacked many features that even Lemmy has. And, since everyone was able to create 2 communities, there were more communities than users. Most of them were created and forgotten, while others tried to get bigger with only 1 user posting everyday. The biggest/mainstream communities had less than 100k users each one. After some days, I joined Lemmy and never looked back.

[–] reksas@sopuli.xyz 20 points 3 days ago (2 children)

blaming? shouldnt they have celebrated how much people utilize their beloved slopmachines?

[–] titanicx@lemmy.zip 9 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Dude an idiotic thing is one of the biggest sellers for dig was their stupid AI slop notifications that helped tell you what the article was about. I fucking hated that so much.

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[–] BigJohnnyHines@lemmy.ca 45 points 4 days ago (11 children)

People are naive to think there aren’t also thousands of bots here in the Fediverse.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 64 points 4 days ago (11 children)

The only thing keeping the bot population low here is that there just aren't enough people here to be worth it yet. If the Fediverse grows they'll come in greater numbers.

[–] AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 34 points 4 days ago (4 children)

It's also not as SEO-gameable (since fediverse domains are inherently more fragmented than a large, high-reputation domain for SEO algorithms to rank highly), and doesn't have an inherent monetization system (unlike platforms like Twitter with their ad payouts), so that's a couple more things going for us.

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[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 18 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

The Fediverse has a lot more safeguards in place, in particular the ability to require a message to register an account, such as my instance requires, weeds out 99% of bots.

We can also defederate from instances that become overwhelmed from bots if they have lax sign-up requirements (already happened a few times), which vastly limits their ability to take hold.

The bigger problem for us, I think, is the fight against bot scrapers. Anubis is keeping them at bay for now, but it will likely be an ongoing cat and mouse game until the AI bubble bursts.

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[–] Sat@lemmy.world 41 points 4 days ago (7 children)

I tried using it and was kinda hopeful, but NSFW was against their TOS which is a no go.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 27 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Not on my wholesome christian server /s

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 13 points 4 days ago

*Holesome 😏

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[–] BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago

Prude and ambicious. Executives these days...

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[–] nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

damn you think they would have just used cloud flare click on the bus

[–] FistingEnthusiast@lemmy.world 37 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Their tolerance of racism and bigotry was why I left

It seemed like every shitty person wanted to make it a far-right safe place

I'm glad it failed

[–] dadpolice@piefed.social 4 points 3 days ago

It was just reddit with a nicer interface but the exact same awful users. There was absolutely no reason for anyone to use it. 

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 14 points 4 days ago (15 children)
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[–] swizzlestick@lemmy.zip 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Honestly, the first rebirth as a run-of-the-mill article aggregator was better. A lot of it I'd have already seen elsewhere, but occasionally it'd have something interesting that I missed.

Whatever they do, they'll still be riding the name of a very dead horse.

[–] ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 22 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Wasn't AI part of their "selling" point?

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[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago

These things need to grow from grassroots.

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