this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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[–] swizzlestick@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 hours ago

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.

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 31 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 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 8 points 7 hours ago (1 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.

[–] Stern@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

I paid 5 bucks for a founder badge. I've spent more on poorer decisions but that only reduces the sting a little.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 7 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours 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.

[–] vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago

Hey now let's be fair, not all of it is AI propaganda. Some of it is shrimp Jesus. Mind you that also started as propaganda but it's since devolved into something so much more fascinating, namely because how the fuck do you even get to shrimp Jesus.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 173 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (9 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 22 points 11 hours ago (2 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 37 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours 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 8 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

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.

[–] W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Which Futurama movie so I can rewatch?

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[–] Sat@lemmy.world 30 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Sat@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

It's back as an archive and a new instance though.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Not on my wholesome christian server /s

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 13 points 9 hours ago

*Holesome 😏

Dead internet ~~theory~~ reality

[–] BigJohnnyHines@lemmy.ca 34 points 13 hours ago (9 children)

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

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 47 points 12 hours ago (10 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.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 hours ago

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 are become overwhelmed from bots if they have lax sign-up requirements (which has already happened a few times), which vastly limits their ability to take hold.

The bigger problem for us, I think, is the fight against not 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.

[–] AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 21 points 10 hours ago (1 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.

[–] vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago

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.

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[–] FistingEnthusiast@lemmy.world 27 points 13 hours ago (1 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 11 points 9 hours ago (1 children)
[–] FistingEnthusiast@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I had interactions with a few, and they were very much the typical, stupid, bigoted yank

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

it's crazy how you used the word bigoted and a slur in the same sentence.

[–] Miaou@jlai.lu 3 points 3 hours ago

Is it a slur if these people are proud of it?

[–] PhoenixDog@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

Where's the slur?

[–] FistingEnthusiast@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

It's crazy how little I value your opinion

[–] ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 16 points 13 hours ago (4 children)

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

[–] garretble@lemmy.world 3 points 6 hours ago

Right? Weren’t they making some AI podcast or something as well?

None of that sounded good.

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[–] wabafee@lemmy.world 0 points 5 hours ago

They missed an opportunity there. Could have pivot something similar to moltbook.

[–] fubarx@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago

MySpace reboot vs Spotify.

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