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.

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

Which Futurama movie so I can rewatch?

Bill hicks had it right.

Not on my wholesome christian server /s

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.

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.

If there are, theyre not very active

those were the bots

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

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

None of that sounded good.

lol I still have a screenshot of Digg from when every article on the home page had this key in it.

Straight off to jail with you!

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

Apparently you can get that sequence from an AI bot if you ask it "correctly". But rules for thee and all that.

Its good that you have enough self-control to hand over your keys when you've had too much to drink.

Are you waiting to accept my limp comment?

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.