LCPDigg’s open beta shuts down after just two months, blaming AI bot spam
brucethemooseWhen 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.
The majority of new users was bots twenty years ago. How was this news to these chuckleheads?
And the majority of posts were mrbabyman.
I mean it’s worth saying that the new bots are kind of a different league to the old bots.
Yeah, so it REALLY SHOULDNT BE A SURPRISE
But now bots pass captcha and use a real browser. So… it’s not easy removing them.
🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞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 faming 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.
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.
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.
RR∆S®MinoriMirari®.ProdI agree with tbis statement whole heartily.
SpookyBogMonsterFuck that, being back boolean operators!!!
¿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
:) your interwebers journey began the same yesr 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 :)
Bill Hicks on "Marketing" (Explicit Language)
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
Drink Coke.
Bender’s Big Score, the first one. I was thinking of the scammer aliens, who have that same attitude SEO folks tend to carry.
I love that entire series. 🫶
kinklesI 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.
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:
cabbageHow 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.
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?
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
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.
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.
RimuI 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.
ordnance_qf_17_pounderDead internet theory reality
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.
I was curious how they planned to monetize, but some questions are pointless to ask - all you’ll get are the responses prepared for maximal PR value…
I think I had read somewhere that they would eventually have ads, but that may have just been member speculation.
Maybe if they go down the Apollo route they could have some sub tiers, but we’ll see.
Wasn’t AI part of their “selling” point?
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.
garretble
JohnDoesn’t reddit already have ai?
Ai HyperFictional. Don’t get lost in allat.