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Digg’s open beta shuts down after just two months, blaming AI bot spam (www.theverge.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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https://digg.com/

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[–] 238 points 8 months ago* (26 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.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago* (3 children)

    Which Futurama movie so I can rewatch?

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  • [–] 32 points 8 months ago (14 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.

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  • [–] 65 points 8 months 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.

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  • [–] 12 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (5 children)

    Fuck that, bring back boolean operators!!!

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  • [–] 15 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months 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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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    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.'

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (2 children)

    :) your interwebers journey began the same year I was born. I didnt join in these "dark places" tell about the year 2000.

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago* (4 children)

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

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    • [–] 31 points 7 months ago (15 children)

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

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  • [–] 25 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    Straight off to jail with you!

    For those who don't remember this- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I know about it, but didn't recognize the code. So I assumed, they encoded some text to make it harder to read. So I tried decoding it.

    Turns out, if you decode this in UTF-16, it turns into a japanese sentence

    契ȑ璝寣䇘앖噣삈

    Which means (according to DeepL)

    The sound of the wind rustling through the trees

    And now I'm confused, why.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Thanks for the link I never remembered the numbers to know if it was for that or not...course been online long enough to know that's the code (style) shown in comments. Was a lot of comments at one point.

    My only unsureness of the code is cause I'm old and miss newer stuff so had to check to be sure.

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  • [–] 16 points 7 months 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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  • [–] -2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Did they really demand a key be removed like . Ehhh this why you should use cryptographic tokenization, non static securities.. . Ehhh lol.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Yup.
    The problem is, how do you guarantee access control that works offline?

    DVD DRM was based on a pretty simple system that was easy to crack.
    HD-DVD (former blu-ray competitor) DRM was more advanced. Someone hacked a software player and extracted its decode key, which this was.
    The DRM was designed to be updateable so any discs manufactured after this leak would use different keys (and anyone using the software app that'd been hacked would need an update). That didn't stop this key from working on every disc in existence at the time.

    That's the problem with making software decoding available. It had to work offline, so you could have an authorized player software, and feed it any valid disk, and it'd Just Work. So even if you put a crypto enclave in the drive controller, the player software still needs its own way to authenticate itself to the drive.

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  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago*

    aside from like, I mean I see your point there. I have been doing a little work here and there studying Quantum based keying and security. Even being one the more well rounded casual internet individuals with a greater technicality of understanding said stuff. It still scares me, if not more so being able to see when even my own capacity to keep up with it all that or even just the complexity of these new age Ai systems does get to me, not gona lie about that. Watching my own abilities to not just know but even the tail end of conceptual break down of not what exactly powers these things nor at what line they have or the validity of the Ai's own thinking and its true or not understandings "those things I get and can wrap my mind around" But lately fully being able to keep up with i.e. I will give you one or so examples that does and even scares me half to death, because I not only have no idea entirely at said point, but what I do know is an Ai of such magnitude would supersede mine and likely the majority if not all human technical capabilities, stuff like Quantum cognition architectures are quite hard to wrap the brain around, and with Latent‐Space these days exceeding either parties full understanding, no Ai nor human can currently fully explain whats happening in some the latest or future conceptual GAi: generative Ai tandems of systems. They say blackbox, but we understand most "blackbox" atleast conceptually, some the newest algorithmic and multi modality systems though become any ones guess. I myself am just hoping at this point to keep up with Quantum related security protocols and possible insights on research into such things.

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    • [–] 23 points 8 months ago (9 children)

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

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago (3 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

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months 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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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    "we're reddit, but with AI!"

    I noped so hard away from digg

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  • [+] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)
    [deleted]
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    • [–] 62 points 7 months ago* (6 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.

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  • [–] 18 points 7 months 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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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (1 child)

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

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Yeah, same. What I found weird is that they couldn't even send a freaking message. No "hey, we're shutting down", and I guess some people will be annoyed because they lost their saved stuff.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (2 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.

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    • [–] 16 points 7 months ago (2 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.

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    • [–] 43 points 8 months ago (9 children)

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

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    RIP lemmynsfw.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

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

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    • [–] 13 points 8 months 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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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    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...

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