this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 227 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 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 1 week 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 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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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[–] W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Which Futurama movie so I can rewatch?

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[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

The majority of "new users" was bots twenty years ago. How was this news to these chuckleheads?

[–] TheFogan@programming.dev 40 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I mean it's worth saying that the new bots are kind of a different league to the old bots.

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[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 week ago

But now bots pass captcha and use a real browser. So… it’s not easy removing them.

[–] ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 9 points 1 week ago

And the majority of posts were mrbabyman.

Dead internet ~~theory~~ reality

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 58 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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.

[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week 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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[–] Katana314@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week 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 1 week ago (1 children)

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

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[–] BigJohnnyHines@lemmy.ca 46 points 1 week ago (11 children)

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

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 64 points 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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 1 week ago (3 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 1 week ago (2 children)

Not on my wholesome christian server /s

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 13 points 1 week ago

*Holesome 😏

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[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 9 points 1 week ago (4 children)
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[–] BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

Prude and ambicious. Executives these days...

[–] FistingEnthusiast@lemmy.world 37 points 1 week 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

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (15 children)
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[–] rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world 32 points 1 week ago (7 children)

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

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 25 points 1 week ago (5 children)
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[–] dan@upvote.au 17 points 1 week 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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[–] ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 22 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I mean, reddit only got big because Digg made some very stupid moves before, so ... pretty on brand

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[–] reksas@sopuli.xyz 20 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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

[–] titanicx@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 week 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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[–] ApollosArrow@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

There were entire communities popping up dedicated to SEO and advertising. A lot of the spam would happen during the US night time, so they’d have to wake up every morning to sweeping away all the crap. Really curious on how they intend to handle the bots.

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[–] swizzlestick@lemmy.zip 13 points 1 week 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.

[–] etherphon@piefed.world 10 points 1 week ago

One of the complaints I had about the place was how AI positive it was, I guess that explains it.

[–] devolution@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Man. I liked Digg. Not as much as Lemmy, but I liked it.

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[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

well duh, reddit/X/Insta, MEta,,etc is infested by AI BOT/bot spammers for a while to spread propaganda or do things like promote links of OF, or other businesses. thats the other reason why they are very ban heavy as of late. diggs or any other platform would suffer the same fate.

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[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

These things need to grow from grassroots.

[–] XLE@piefed.social 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is ~~democracy~~ democratization manifest.

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