Technology

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.

Bill hicks had it right.

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

Not on my wholesome christian server /s

those were the bots

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.

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.

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

It was basically exactly Reddit but with two noticeable AI features that were easy to ignore:

1. An AI-generated summary of popular posts on the homepage
2. 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.

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.