- cross-posted to:
- quarks@startrek.website
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Didn’t you have to buy an account at Digg? If so, were the bots buying the accounts? And if so, who was buying them?
No you just had to request the account and then one would be provided to you when they open it up. I finally received my account a couple months ago. It was worse than it is here. I was hoping for some good alternatives to Reddit but overall Lemmy is only halfway there digg was only a third of the way there.
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.
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.
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.
Fuck that, bring back boolean operators!!!
yum
¿Por qué no los dos?
Absolutely 100%. It is so frustrating to search for a couple of terms and have the search engine just ignore one or two of them, like no your stupid AI does not understand what I actually want please just give me what I fucking asked for.
It… yeah gota be more then good at writing a google search. It’s a practice for sure if using like “LLMs” for info grabs and auto blog skimming.
udm14.com if you want good old fashioned, classic no-bs search back
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.
I agree with this statement whole heartily.
You also have a point. HOW DARE WE AGREE. :)
Well, except that I think that - to a decent extent - the changing requirements for SEO generally have still improved it. I’m comparing to the days of keyword stuffing, which doesn’t work anymore, for example. Nowadays, it does have to be text that flows and is somewhat natural.
THAT said, I will myself point to recipe sites that give you a novel before the recipe for SEO purposes. I’m certainly not saying it’s perfect by any means.’
The results are awful though. Over the past few years, I can hardly even think of a single search where SEO quickly brought me to “the page I was looking for”; searches end in either a wall of spam, or me getting frustrated and more directly finding what I already know I want. Smaller sites I used to love have withered and died, buried from the lack of earnest traffic. Malicious URLs rise above the businesses they are copying.
In other words, what does it matter if SEO is “improved” if the results are junk? It’s clearly not working better, unless one’s a scammer, or a corporation that benefits from the consolidation.
:) your interwebers journey began the same year I was born. I didnt join in these “dark places” tell about the year 2000.
Well, internet in 1994, but I was on BBSes from 1987. heh.
No harm in coming along later. You’ll get to see the cool shit (and… shitty shit) after I’m gone :)
haha😄 .
Drink Coke.
The majority of “new users” was bots twenty years ago. How was this news to these chuckleheads?
But now bots pass captcha and use a real browser. So… it’s not easy removing them.
I mean it’s worth saying that the new bots are kind of a different league to the old bots.
Yeah, so it REALLY SHOULDN’T BE A SURPRISE
And the majority of posts were mrbabyman.
Which Futurama movie so I can rewatch?
Bender’s Big Score, the first one. I was thinking of the scammer aliens, who have that same attitude SEO folks tend to carry.
Yes!
I love that entire series. 🫶
Dead internet
theoryrealityPeople are naive to think there aren’t also thousands of bots here in the Fediverse.
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.
Deleted by moderator
For someone who likes digging around in my Reddit history you’d think you’d be able to find something that was actually relevant to the topic at hand. That was a comment about the uses of agentic coding tools for making custom applications, not about building bots.
Yeah, well, I judge you for participating in all those scat and cuck subreddits.
DISCLAIMER: This is a joke. I haven’t stalked them on reddit. Just being silly and want that to be clear. :)
Deleted by moderator
This particular user is a special kind of one. Once you make the wrong noises about something they don’t like, they make it their personal mission to start digging for anything even remotely looking like dirt that they can sling your way - as they’re now demonstrating below.
I couldn’t imagine being that bored.
It’s linked in his public profile.
Edit: Speaking of blind rage, I hope you downvoted this accidentally…
Stop being a weirdo or go start a tech company so your behaviour is at least expected.
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.
The only time I’ve even seen the fediverse pop up in a search was when I was doing some black magic nonsense getting Linux to do what I wanted. Yes it was a Linux community no it didn’t help.
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.
the moderation and comment moderation history is nice but it is sort of hidden. that would be nicer if it was more intuitively inline. Also did you mean “bot scrapers” rather than “not scrapers”. And I have been toying with the idea, what about ai or bot supported pipelines, accept that they are part of the visitors, provide it optimized data, and then restrict ui/ux heavy processes to stricter rate limits per second, etc…sort of like a robots txt v2 or something
It’s less hidden for admins. Whenever we click on a user’s profile, there’s a button that can take us directly to their individual mod-log history, which can help us quickly see if there’s a history of AI or bot spam behavior that was spotted by other admins/mods.
Also did you mean “bot scrapers”
Agh, auto correct got me. Yes, I meant bot scrapers.
As for the robots.txt v2 idea, I’m not sure that would be very effective or popular amongst admins, as I think most would prefer not to give it any data if possible, and even with reduced rates, there would probably still be enough bots and queries to present a significant issue.
I think there have been some experiments with ‘trapping’ bots in a recursive loop that they don’t realize is a loop, and therefore can’t escape, but I’m not sure how effective those have been.
I wonder if there is any inherent defence against slop on Lemmy. I guess if an instance doesn’t prune it’s user base of bots, shills and other slop merchants, it could be black listed by other admins of other instances.
My instance bans non-consensual AI content and users. Rimu’s tools have made that a lot easier to do, I get an alert when the system detects a possible AI user.
VPNs on lemmy = punishable by … 👇that’s a bot.
No, but there is on PieFed.social. Mods and admins have functionality to check any post or comment for LLM-generated text. There’s more stuff too.
Generally I share my findings with Lemmy admins so they can ban the account.
I think this is a pretty big threat to the fediverse and social media in general and am taking it very seriously. At the moment the amount of slop is pretty low but we need to be ready for the deluge when it comes.
check any post or comment for LLM-generated text
Presumably with about the same tools that gleefully give false positives when checking school assignments.
This may come as a surprise to you so brace yourself.
I am not stupid.
Well, firstly, I’ve seen the Piefed code.
Secondly, I doubt it that you have some magical accurate AI-detection tools, and Digg and Reddit don’t.
Your AI detection tools are really helpful, thanks for all your hard work.
If there are, theyre not very active
I’ve been noticing a lot more definitely-AI-generated “blogposts” and full-on ads in my Mastodon hashtag feeds.
It’s a fairly new thing.
75% of the accounts I’ve had to ban in the roughly-two-years since I spun up my instance have been AI slopfaucets that popped up in the last 2 weeks.
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.
hmm?
They’re doing it wrong. Use crypto for login and charge user for every single resource used. Problem solved
They missed an opportunity there. Could have pivot something similar to moltbook.
I think I had blocked maybe one or two of the default communities very early on, and after that I hadn’t noticed any spam. I used the app at least once a day since the open beta started. Whatever they were doing to combat the bots appeared to be working. It’s a huge shame they thought otherwise and shut down.
Not noticing it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Isn’t that the best we can ask for nowadays though?
Don’t lower your bar.
I didn’t notice the spam and I was quite happy using the new Digg, so I don’t exactly know what you think I should have been doing differently.
To reiterate, my points are:
- You just didn’t notice the bots
- You should always advocate for less slop
How was it? Did it feel lively?
I just checked the front page a couple of times out of curiosity, but I never bothered really checking it out too much. I was always surprised how dead it looked from the outside, but that might have been the wrong impression.
Edit: As an illustration, the last snapshot of Digg on internet archive a couple of days ago shows a front page where almost all posts had less than 30 upvotes, and the only two posts breaking above 50 are tech nostalgia posts about a Windows 98 screensaver (105 upvotes, 9 comments) and some young woman reviewing instagram 15 years ago (59 upvotes, 6 comments). Fitting for a platform from the past, worrying if they wanted to be part of the future.
In terms of activity, Digg thus never seemed to be able to keep up with more famous and well-funded competitors such as eviltoast.org. Never mind that a lot of the users seemed to have been trolls upset about being banned by Reddit. SEO is probably part of the problem, but it seems unlikely to be the full story. I think their problem is that it never took off.
It was active enough that there was new content every day. Checking multiple times a day I’d see the same stuff but I saw that as a positive that kept me from wasting too much time.
Did it have niche communities that had successfully moved over, but that were not featured on the front page?
Sorry if it’s a stupid question, I just always had the impression I didn’t understand what I was looking at and now it’s gone and I’m genuinely curious.
My community is a niche one Albumartworksheaven. It took me a month to have more followers on digg than here in 6 months. My community was featured twice
Oooh, neat community! Joined!
I guess that’s one benefit of a smaller site - if you put down the effort in it, it stands out more. But community discovery is absolutely a challenge.
I don’t think many of the niche communities really had time to thrive, since people were trying to build up a lot of the main ones. I think some were starting to just get traction, which could be a reason why they chose now, stopping before it really got away from them.
It had some, yeah. Maybe not “successfully moved” per-say but they were there. I never really got a chance to dig into them very much but I was a member of the /spongebob community and it had some sincere activity from people who wanted to grow it into something fun and engaging.
That’s interesting and I missed that post, thanks!
It can be easy to lose track of how successful the fediverse already is, as the number of users will remain negligible compared to mainstream platforms for a really long time and possibly forever. Seeing how it easily outperforms a major player like Digg trying to re-establish themselves puts things into perspective.
Maybe they’ll relaunch as a piefed instance, lol
I was thinking the same thing when I read this:
A small but determined team is stepping up to rebuild with a completely reimagined angle of attack. Positioning Digg as simply an alternative to incumbents wasn’t imaginative enough. That’s a race we were never going to win. What comes next needs to be genuinely different.
Small team, completely reimagined, not simply an alternative, genuinely different… They are describing a federated instance.
Didn’t spend a lot of time there but my experience was similar. Didn’t notice any spam, but activity was sparse.
Wasn’t AI part of their “selling” point?
“we’re reddit, but with AI!”
I noped so hard away from digg
Right? Weren’t they making some AI podcast or something as well?
None of that sounded good.
If it was, it was a bad stratagy.
AI is the only industry that is somehow nonprofitable, without customers, and yet also propping up the economy right now.
Just waiting for this stupid bubble to pop
I mean, reddit only got big because Digg made some very stupid moves before, so … pretty on brand
Reddit was doing fine before the influx from Digg. That’s one of the reasons people migrated to reddit in the first place - because it was already viable. That said, it was an influx of users, for sure.
It was better before the influx from Digg imo
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.
Basically this, yes haha
OH NO! But how? They resurrected Kevin Rose for this! /s
LOL
I tried using it and was kinda hopeful, but NSFW was against their TOS which is a no go.
RIP lemmynsfw.
It’s back as an archive and a new instance though.
What’s the new instance? I must have missed it.
Fedinsfw.app
Nice, thanks. https://fedinsfw.app/comment/102038
Prude and ambicious. Executives these days…
Not on my wholesome christian server /s
*Holesome 😏
LOL…
Ah man, I applied for the beta months ago but never gotten a response. For those who manages to enter how was it? Was it a Lemmy/Redit style or more like Instagram/Facebook.
I found it boring and mostly dead. Most links had a dozen comments at most, almost all of them very short and very few of them thoughtful at all.
It was basically exactly Reddit but with two noticeable AI features that were easy to ignore:
- An AI-generated summary of popular posts on the homepage
- Underneath every link post to an article was an AI summary, but on the app it was a collapsible section so collapsing it in one post would keep it collapsed for all.
I found the second one slightly handy, though, because when I was on Reddit I fell into the bad habit of posting after just reading headlines. With the AI summaries I could get more context and it often lead me to opening more articles than I would have without it.
It was okay during closed beta, more dead than here, but similar.
Man. I liked Digg. Not as much as Lemmy, but I liked it.
I liked Digg right up until they folded like a cheap suit over the HD DVD decryption key.
folded like a cheap suit
Funnier because of all the T-shirts printed with that key on them.
I had one.
