7 ms·

The most talented person in the world

260 points by keyboardJones 2y ago

ggm 2y ago
Buries the lede. WHY would you make so many talanted instances of Jodie? Whats the upside. How do the financials work and is it a stake, or paid labour?
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > WHY would you make so many talanted instances of Jodie? One name is twice as easy to invent as two names.
  - lupire 2y ago
    Choosing a name isn't the bulk in the cost structure.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- roncesvalles 2y ago
  Blogspam sites are made by the exact same kind of "hustle bros" who run dropshipping companies. The business model is very simple and requires 3 ingredients: web design, SEO, and copyediting. The first two are one-time costs. The 3rd one is a COGS and there is a whole market of professional blogwriters who charge something per 1000 words. To answer your question, once you create a blog that starts printing money, it's in your best interest to just replicate it while changing as little of the "template" as possible, because you don't really know what element made it click.
  - ggm 2y ago
    So if Jodie the expert in fishing works, you try cricket, music, cabbage-patch dolls on the assumption .. the ideation of Jodie worked? Feels like a big assumption that the magic was Jodie, and not the context of fishing. Ie your "you don't really know what element made it click." above assumed Jodie was the fixed value, no matter what else. That's what I don't get: I click on lego spam because I like lego, not because Jodie is cool and I love his wordsmithing. That follows on. I'm probably being thick. Maybe it's because to the recipient Jodie is unique each time? It's "this is the least important part of it" so they don't change it because IT DOESN'T MATTER.
- adolph 2y ago
  > WHY would you make so many talanted instances of Jodie? Because Jodie is everywhere and got your girl back home https://taskandpurpose.com/military-life/brief-history-jody-original-mr-steal-girl/ https://taskandpurpose.com/military-life/brief-history-jody-...
gandalfthepink 2y ago
She is second best to the worlds truly all rounder person. Johnny Sins.
BobbyTables2 2y ago
I’m amazed my medical websites… The top 5-10 sites all seem have identical wording for common conditions. In the age of copyright enforcement and DMCA antics, I don’t understand how this continues year after year.
- grugagag 2y ago
  They’re all the same thing, same owners likely
- greenavocado 2y ago
  All major public facing organizations are slowly bought out by extremely wealthy and influential groups when they get big enough for narrative control purposes because ultimately mind control is the largest source of wealth and power.
- geerlingguy 2y ago
  I worked in a hospital system for a time—those documents are often integrated through a medical system where the hospital pays a recurring subscription, and the site developers just plug things through an API to display the documents from the central medical system. Thus, you have one document that's identical across dozens or hundreds of different hospital and medical system websites. A long time ago, I held more weight in results from reputable places like Mayo Clinic, but even their site seems to be the same as all the others now.
  - azinman2 2y ago
    But is the purchased information not good?
- DavidPiper 2y ago
  A family member works for a company that writes and publishes a mandatory handbook for GPs in Australia. One day the WHO found them and wholesale copied large chunks of their content verbatim into their online resources without asking or informing. They only found out because THEY went looking on the WHO website for the latest information on something. At that point I started wondering just how much of big companies' work and content is just plagiarism and gratuitous theft from reputable but less visible or popular sources (also highly dependent on country, language, etc). And that was before I discovered hbomberguy on YouTube.
api 2y ago
This kind of spam was already destroying the web before LLMs came along. Now it’s being accelerated by thousands of times. Mainstream web search is probably cooked. Kagi and other niche players might have a chance if the fact that they are not beholden to advertisers lets them introduce features to do things like downrank content with ads. Kagi has “small web” which I think includes this in its weighting. Open social media is probably cooked too. In the future it’s going to require proof of human identity and will be more heavily moderated. The future of social is closed forums. Even those are really having to fight bots though. The other pervasive awful trend of the moment is everything becoming like John Deere tractors: cloud connected, DRMed, with subscriptions and/or planned obsolescence. Capitalism is supposed to reward people for creating value, but today it seems like it’s far easier and more profitable to just extract rent or scam. I am not sure how to fix this.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  I think we'll end up moving away from shallow signifiers of trustworthiness to reputational networks and evidence someone has invested into an identity or entity. That's not to say it's a solved problem, even in the real world with thousands of years of battle tested strategies. A very simple example would be a web browser where I could blacklist chronically-unhelpful sites, and share that metadata among friends.
- keyboardJones 2y ago
  My strategy been to put my money where my mouth is and start paying for services that provide value to me (Kagi is one example - I’m a paying customer, and actually found this article using their small web site)
  - cal85 2y ago
    Strategy for what?
- munificent 2y ago
  The hyper-enshittification stages look like: 1. People get on the web and make real content with care because they're just excited to share stuff with each other. 2. Advertisers talk them into putting some ads on their pages so they can get some compensation for their work. 3. Shitty people figure out you can just make content where the main incentive is to get people to go to the page and see the ads. 4. Those people then outsource writing the content to the lowest bidder. 5. The lowest bidder becomes an LLM. 6. Search engines cut out the middle-man entirely and just send your search query to an LLM, stuff some ads in, and show the result to the user without ever hitting the web (except to periodically scrape it for model training). 7. Because of 6, people stop putting new content on the web at all. The models get shittier and stupider with regards to current events. 8. To counter that, LLM companies make deals with news organizations and other primary source information provides and pay them to have direct access to content to train their models. 9. Those organizations get such a large fraction of their income from those deals that eventually they get out of the business of giving human readers direct access to it because it's not worth the effort. Newspapers become B2B companies. 10. The only way to get information is via a handful of giant tech companies sitting on top of huge LLMs saying who-knows-what trained on a slurry of actual information and giant piles of ads. I hope that somewhere in the process people start to get tired of talking to machines all day and hop off the ride entirely and starting calling up their friends and getting information the old fashioned way. The only consolation I have is the belief that people have a deep seated desire to connect to actual humans and know the real truth about the world.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
All of those sites are labeled as "A Venture 4th Media Company" which has such wondrous important content all run by the same "writer" on: https://mtbinsider.com/author/jodie-chiffey/ https://turfandtill.com/author/jodie-chiffey/ https://www.betterwander.com/author/jodie-chiffey/ https://artofgrill.com/author/jodie-chiffey/ https://theathleticfoot.com/author/jodie-chiffey/ https://altprotein.com/team-members/jodie-chiffey/ https://digitalguyde.com/us/ https://total3dprinting.org/author/jodie-chiffey/ Each of which is registered by NameCheap, who can never seem to kick their addiction to bottom feeders. Each of which is behind Cloudflare, the official latrine of planet dysentery. disclosure: I use too.
- seanhunter 2y ago
  What's interesting is I keep my old blog up even though it is basically never updated. I receive 3 or 4 emails a week from people like Jodie Chiffey saying they would like me to consider hosting a "guest article" by them about some topic or other. The content and SEO mill is absolutely gigantic.
dalemhurley 2y ago
Google has an incentive to keep these links going. Google makes money by you continually returning back to Google. If you get the prefect result on your first click, then you move on with your day. If you get junk, then you go back to Google and click the next junk link and repeat. Each time someone visits one of these content farms and returns back to Google, then it is more advertising dollars for Google.
- munificent 2y ago
  This is a classic argument and appears in many many forms: * "Psychologists don't want to fix your problems because then you'll stop needing therapy every week." * "Dating sites don't actually want you to find a long-term partner because then you'll stop using the site." * "The mechanic's not trying to actually fix your car, just get it running for a few weeks so it breaks down again and you come back." Etc. etc. Any time there is information asymmetry and leaving a customer not fully satisfied might lead to future sales, this old canard comes up. I'm sure in some cases it's true. But, like, people aren't entirely stupid. Consumers generally won't keep repeatedly going back to the same business if the service is kinda sucky. And businesses generally figure out that reputation matters and the most economically viable long-term strategy is just to give people what they want.
  - xyzzy123 2y ago
    Both things can be true at the same time, it depends on the time preference of the business owner.
  - roughly 2y ago
    > long-term strategy This is where the theory falls apart. When “long-term strategy” and “short-term quarterly earnings” get into the boardroom together at a public company, it ain’t “long-term strategy” that’s walking out.
    - vineyardmike 2y ago
      It can be though. "Short Term" tends to win when CEO pay is contingent upon hitting certain share price at certain times. Founders tend to not have this issue, and I'm sure other CEOs can have pay packages crafted this way if we desired.
raymondgh 2y ago
Maybe a social endorsement scheme could be an alternative to an invasive proof system.
- yen223 2y ago
  If there's a social endorsement scheme that doesn't involve real-world identity, I don't see how you won't end up with a situation where Bot_A is counted as legit, being endorsed by Bot_B...Bot_Z
  - ms-menardi 2y ago
    because once Bot_J and Bot_Q are discovered to be bots, then everyone they've authenticated suddenly needs new people to vouch for them. problem is, how do you figure out someone's a bot? Ah well maybe someone will make an AI tool for that, we humans are too busy doing groceries and putting round cubes into square holes.
  - raymondgh 2y ago
    That kind of verification could be off-protocol. Perhaps a reputation or incentive system could help as well.
    - datadrivenangel 2y ago
      Mission fucking accomplished. [0] 0 - https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- 256_ 2y ago
  CAs tend to revoke a domain's certificates if it's used for crime. Maybe they should do the same for SEO spam.
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  Like maybe a website is considered better if it is linked to by other websites? Kinda like research papers... We could call it "Page Rank". I bet we could get a major university (eg. Stanford) to help fund the initial deployment. I think we should call it a really big silly number, like "Gazillion" to emphasize how much it knows. Obviously this won't have ads, and it should make an explicit point to not be evil.... Hmm. I think I've heard this before.
roughly 2y ago
The reason all of this exists - the reason the entire Internet turned into an unusable amalgam of horseshit - is because we built the entire commercial side of the internet off ad revenue. It might be a death spiral at this point - I can’t imagine anyone actually being willing to Pay for whatever the fuck Google or Facebook have become, so there’s nothing left to do but keep inventing new ways to generate bullshit and new bots to view it for you.
- foobarboo 2y ago
  I pay for Kagi and I have to say it's so worth it. Very fast and no more trash result, a lot of customizability, filters, lenses, etc. They even have an incentive to make my searches worth while since I pay a flatrate.
- caseyy 2y ago
  The internet is the largest and most elaborate monument to marketing we may ever build.
  - flir 2y ago
    Ye of little faith. Some day we'll project that Coca-Cola logo on to the moon.
    - the_sleaze_ 2y ago
      someday we'll sell the edges of our peripheral vision for ad space in lieu of a universal basic income
      - notpachet 2y ago
        Aren't we already doing that?
      - TacticalCoder 2y ago
        > someday we'll sell the edges of our peripheral vision for ad space in lieu of a universal basic income Meta and RayBan are working on that and not far: the RayBans "Meta take a picture" / "Meta take a movie" are a thing. And I doubt very much that it's done with good motives. No HUD yet but they've already got a microphone to analyze your voice (for good reasons, we're sure) and speakers.
acscott 2y ago
The equation to rank links is a poor substitute for an editor. Editors used to be the gateway of information that was disbursed via newspaper, radio, and TV. They were not without fault. So what is the least faulty filter? (Even your own brain, eyes, and ears are faulty, sorry perfectionists.) You cannot trust video or audio now due to deepfakes. What can you trust as a source of information more than 50%? There's still information in the noise, you have to become your own editor.
- rileymat2 2y ago
  Google originally used back links in the equation; where the goal is to take the information by editors on a massive aggregate to rank. Brilliant until gamed.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
> The only future of the internet is, sadly, proof-of-person and proof-of-residence on every public network interaction. I'm going to be that pedant and point out that the Internet is not the same as the Web, and it's the Web that's sick. The Internet is fine. It's a distinction that matters because the Internet is expensive things like satellites and undersea cables. It's an investment that's too large to just walk away from, so perhaps its future is our future. The Web is just a bunch of conventions about how to use the Internet, it's not binding in any way. We can write a different protocol without laying new cable, we can make it less profitable for abusers, and then we can abandon the sick version that we're currently using.
- lupire 2y ago
  The post you replied to didn't say anything about the Internet being sick.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  The rest of the internet has even less reputation & ability to assess than the web. Nothing else has links worth a damn, and links while fakeable also do say something sometimes.
- caseyy 2y ago
  Yes, but we all get what the author means. UDP or TCP, SMTP or HTTP — most of it is transporting low value sludge whose purpose is to exploit its consumers. It involves everything from somewhat benign forms of surveillance/profiling to aggressively malicious scams. You could use the infrastructure for better and many people do. But most of the content on the internet isn’t that.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
frabjoused 2y ago
Has anyone built a search engine that uses LLMs to pre-grade every page with metrics such as: - Commercial bias (content compared to the source, which it learns about) - Insincere motives - Bloat (how many words it takes to say how little to penalize SEO bloat) I would assume that using LLMs, we can get a pretty good idea of what is SEO bloat and who the bad actors are by this point, and just penalize those results.
- mvkel 2y ago
  We don't need to. We have LLMs now
  - frabjoused 2y ago
    I still would like to search and not get the dog crap that is Google's Internet, in addition to using LLMs myself.
    - komali2 2y ago
      Non LLM efforts include alternative and even self hosted search engine indexes. I'm also curious if brave search's concept of "goggles" could work out, where you can write your own indexing logic and share it with others.
      - frabjoused 2y ago
        We don't need self-hosted alternatives (just like the computer market doesn't need Linux tinkerers) as much as we need a real formidable competitor to dethrone Google and create proper website incentives so the Internet stops sucking. We need SEO companies to realize they will go out of business if they continue to generate crap filler content for their clients. We know Google won't do it. We need influence. We need effective results. Self-hosted is cute but ineffective at best, selfish at worst.
        A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
hamasho 2y ago
I often google Reddit posts to find products or services. Posts with a lot of comments usually have better solutions. I also check out YouTube reviews, especially ones with few dislikes, using addons like "Return YouTube Dislike." These methods are easy and pretty reliable. But it means the platform will soon be flooded with bot-generated spam.
- keyboardJones 2y ago
  Once I heard of ReplyGuy, I knew it was the beginning of the end for forums like Reddit
  - germinator 2y ago
    It's actually one of the perks of centralized platforms like Reddit: if they want to, they have the technology and the resources to investigate bad actors like that. I don't just mean just finding and blocking their IPs, but untangling their ownership, corporate structure, tooling, and so on. Hiring actual PIs if necessary. It's the bread-and-butter for many spam and abuse teams at Big Tech. That said, just because they can doesn't mean they will. It's possible that they've grown complacent and underfunded these capabilities (instead relying on community moderators to weed out bad actors). Or it's possible that they're too focused on the short term to see the existential risks. If I recall correctly, they couldn't resist the temptation of selling user content for LLM training, same as Stack Overflow. But in an internet overrun by spam LLMs, the future are curated, walled-garden communities, and Reddit could be the basis for that.
    - IncreasePosts 2y ago
      Anything which diminishes their usage numbers won't look good for investors, so one should assume no action will be taken by the company which diminishes their usage numbers.
256_ 2y ago
Sometimes I think about whether a nation-state may have an incentive to solve this problem. They could adopt a strict anti-SEO spam policy for their ccTLD and run a publicity campaign telling people about it, so they'd filter search results to that ccTLD, with the purpose of improving the country's reputation (by associating it with high-quality search results). That sounds kind of far-fetched, but it's hard to think of anything else. Maybe you could direct the blame at CAs too. For now, at least we can still put "before:2020" in our search queries.
porksoda 2y ago
How bad does it have to get before it stops working, I mean like phone a friend brittanica yellow pages bad? Quicker and more deeply we get there, the more effort and traction gets behind some breakout solution. Maybe it's just pure cynicism: burn it all. Remember email spam? It got so bad, that we fixed it. I mean email has its issues and how but spam isn't one of them. I built a spam juggernaught in my day (got bills don't I :)) and I feel like I contributed a tiny bit to our almost-spamless latter days. Progress! The world is on the march.
- noobermin 2y ago
  Did you accidentally post the same thing twice or are you making some meta point on spam.
porksoda 2y ago
How bad does it have to get before it stops working, I mean like phone a friend brittanica yellow pages bad? Quicker and more deeply we get there, the more effort and traction gets behind some breakout solution. Maybe it's just pure cynicism: burn it all. Remember email spam? It got so bad, that we fixed it. I mean email has its issues and how but spam isn't one of them. I built a spam juggernaught in my day (got bills don't I :)) and I feel like I contributed a tiny bit to our almost-spamless latter days. Progress! The world is on the march.
- jprete 2y ago
  I find personal email to be almost useless for anything other than mailing lists and online shopping messages. I don't consider it fixed; we already left it to burn.
  - parpfish 2y ago
    I use email constantly but I can’t tell you the last time I saw actual spam in my inbox Sure, there are occasional unwanted marketing emails but those are easily dispatched with unsubscribe and/or inbox filters
    - brabel 2y ago
      Depends on your provider. My GMail is fine, but my much older Hotmail is a spam cesspool. It's so bad I barely check it anymore the last couple of years, despite having been able to keep that email address since something like 1996. As I had "exposed" that to some email farms I probably got into some really bad spammers lists which Microsoft seems unable to stop.
      - Aromasin 2y ago
        I gave up on my Hotmail completely quite recently for the same reason. It seemed to just stop filtering altogether. I'd recieve somewhere on the order of 50 spam emails to my main inbox a day. If anything, it filtered more email I did want than those I didn't. I haven't had the same issue with gmail.
necovek 2y ago
While I understand the frustration of the author in searching the web today (I do too), I am not sure how they get to: > We end up with real time global access from “low trust low income max exploitation because who is going to stop us” wankers to “high trust high income low questioning” societies and everything falls apart. Obviously, there are "low trust high income max exploitation" folks doing the damage too, as one of the linked articles talks about frauds with wiring large sums (in 100ks of dollars) into Hong Kong, which is itself an expensive city. Similarly, from the other direction, you've got high-income communities "exploiting" lower-income communities by getting cheaper labour (like getting things produced in China) — paying less than they would locally for the same or larger work effort. The solution to this is obviously global equalization of salary bands, which is well under way due to an ability to do a lot of highly paid work remotely and globalization in general — but it will take some time (and it's also why China is becoming less appealing in particular: salaries are going up there as well). But that will lead to a new set of problems altogether.
m463 2y ago
I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row. I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru. Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I’m bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge. I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don’t perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat 400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me. I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me. I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis. But I have not yet gone to college. - well known missive from decades ago
- neilv 2y ago
  Thanks, I've not seen that college application essay in ages, and it's written better than most of what I've read since. https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/sj/i-am-a-dynamic-figure/ https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/sj/i-am-a-dynamic-figure/
friend_and_foe 2y ago
I was nodding my head as a member of the choir until > The only future of the internet is, sadly, proof-of-person and proof-of-residence on every public network interaction Yeah, go away. The problem is that Google has monopolized web aggregation. Without it these sites wouldn't be worth making. I've got to show ID to post something online to kick that can down the road? The way I see it this is a self resolving problem. Ad driven search engines rank ad driven blog spam, people get tired of it and use methods of finding content that don't show that garbage, these guys, along with their multinational trillion dollar benefactor, go out of business. Problem solved.
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  > Yeah, go away. The problem is that Google has monopolized web aggregation. Without it these sites wouldn't be worth making. So how will you find things? > Ad driven search engines rank ad driven blog spam We don't have actual concrete proof that Google (or others) rank content with ads higher because of the ads. As a contrary corollary, generally as society grows, we've seen an increase in "proof-of-person and proof-of-residence on every public X". Want welfare checks or charity, prove yourself. Want to buy cough syrup or booze, prove yourself. Want to drive, want to shoot a gun, want to XXXX.... get an ID. In early America, men used to vote by everyone going into a big room and shouting for a while (some minor exaggeration). Now you have to register in advance and show ID, and they maintain registries of everyone and their affiliated party. Showing identity comes with a lack of trust, and volume + anonymity decreases trust as it's slowly abused.
  - friend_and_foe 2y ago
    Look, there's a difference between showing ID to vote or get a free paycheck from someone and showing ID to shout my ideas from a rooftop. I don't need your trust to say things on the internet. If you don't trust me, don't read what I have to say. You can continue trusting Google though, I won't, this is a bait and switch and they're the source of the problem, not your lack of my identifying documents. We have no proof that they're doing it in purpose, I don't care about the intent, I care about the results. How do I find things. I'm already living life without much google in it. There are a lot of ways to find things. Aggregators like this one have a better signal to noise ratio than google or most places that publish a lot of information. There are search engines that actively blacklist anything with SEO in it. There are community groups that focus on topics of interest. I find that I only use big search engines nowadays to find a git repo for something or find out what time some place closes, that's all they're good for nowadays. I trust people more than faceless services, and I don't care anything about who any of those people are in real life.
udev4096 2y ago
I have never come across "AI generated" content in duckduckgo
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
Time to go back to Yahoo! search engine with manually added and verified links. Automated web crawling experiment has failed. Anyway, whatever I search, I end up in either reddit or wikipedia (incidentally, both are human-curated stores of knowledge).
- brabel 2y ago
  I don't know about Wikipedia, but Reddit is full of bots. They're sophisticated enough you may not recognize some comments are not from a human though. That's worse than when it was always obvious.
  - wildrhythms 2y ago
    Not just Reddit; Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, (basically every social media)... full of bots posting and replying to each other. Dead Internet Theory.
sebtron 2y ago
> The only future of the internet is, sadly, proof-of-person and proof-of-residence on every public network interaction. I really hope we do not give up the internet's freedom as they suggest (and I doubt this would solve the spam problem).
- fxtentacle 2y ago
  As much as I hate the idea, I'm convinced it would be a godsent for 99% of the population. Just imagine when you buy your SIM card the phone shop asks you: Do you want to limit incoming calls to people who you either called before or who have ever had a permanent residence in your country? 99% of spam and scam calls blocked, just like that. And just imagine how hilarious it would be if all those Nigerian prince emails had a note that says "actually, the sender of this email has never been to Nigeria"
  - groestl 2y ago
    > actually, the sender of this email has never been to Nigeria Conversely, what if all those emails actually originate from Nigeria? Would it make them more legit?
    - anovikov 2y ago
      They actually indeed originate from Nigeria almost all of the time.
      - groestl 2y ago
        That's what I'm hinting at :)
  - sebtron 2y ago
    99% of the population is also happy with carrying a spyware device everywhere and allowing Google to know everything you do in order to serve you better ads. I am not saying this does not have upsides, but it would be a nightmare to have it imposwd on you.
smusamashah 2y ago
There was another article here on HN some time ago on how big media publishers are littering the web with spam recommendations https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39433451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39433451 (https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/ https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/) This listed review spam from Dotdash Meredith which I used a clue to search and block all sites by them using uBlacklist. Edit: Found another article saying the same thing there are only few big media giant's dominating search https://detailed.com/google-control/ https://detailed.com/google-control/
phillias 2y ago
Who are you protecting? Those who would be duped by it? Are you trying to get rid of salesman? Responding to a dark market with authoritative measures means you're trying to protect suckers. You can't stop people from being victimized. An evolutionary response is the only solution. A graceful decline of suckers is the solution. Do not try to protect them, they will only hate you for it.
pdonis 2y ago
I don't see this issue the way the author of this article does. Both the stated problem and the stated solution seem overblown to me. First, what jumped out at me when I read the article was that I had never heard of Jodie Chiffey before reading the article. I don't see all the trash the author is talking about because I don't spend any time on websites that promote it, or dealing with spam emails from sources of it, etc., etc. I can get along just fine with simply ignoring the existence of all the trash and going to websites (like this one) that I actually want to go to. And how am I able to go to websites like this one without being overwhelmed by trash? Because (a) this website is managed by actual people who aren't interested in spamming me, and (b) HTTPS means I know that when I go to "news.ycombinator.com" I am going to a site managed by those people. In other words, we already have the actual solution to the "how do I avoid the trash" problem, and have had it for decades. We do not need to build a huge new spyware infrastructure to "fix" the web. We already have, and are using, the tools we need to avoid the trash.
kellyfaraway 2y ago
I apologize for not having a solution or complaint here. The discussion is mostly over my head. I just want to point out Matt.sh apparently missed that Jodie’s a hardcore gamer and gaming expert as well as a trusted advisor to senior citizens. She also “… doesn’t want to hold back when it comes to getting the word out about affiliate marketing,” and will teach you her tricks. She is an avid toy insider too, loves toys from the 80’s. Not that bad looking either.

260 points by keyboardJones 2y ago

ggm 2y ago

Buries the lede. WHY would you make so many talanted instances of Jodie? Whats the upside. How do the financials work and is it a stake, or paid labour?

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> WHY would you make so many talanted instances of Jodie? One name is twice as easy to invent as two names.
- lupire 2y ago
  Choosing a name isn't the bulk in the cost structure.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
roncesvalles 2y ago
Blogspam sites are made by the exact same kind of "hustle bros" who run dropshipping companies. The business model is very simple and requires 3 ingredients: web design, SEO, and copyediting. The first two are one-time costs. The 3rd one is a COGS and there is a whole market of professional blogwriters who charge something per 1000 words. To answer your question, once you create a blog that starts printing money, it's in your best interest to just replicate it while changing as little of the "template" as possible, because you don't really know what element made it click.
- ggm 2y ago
  So if Jodie the expert in fishing works, you try cricket, music, cabbage-patch dolls on the assumption .. the ideation of Jodie worked? Feels like a big assumption that the magic was Jodie, and not the context of fishing. Ie your "you don't really know what element made it click." above assumed Jodie was the fixed value, no matter what else. That's what I don't get: I click on lego spam because I like lego, not because Jodie is cool and I love his wordsmithing. That follows on. I'm probably being thick. Maybe it's because to the recipient Jodie is unique each time? It's "this is the least important part of it" so they don't change it because IT DOESN'T MATTER.
adolph 2y ago
> WHY would you make so many talanted instances of Jodie? Because Jodie is everywhere and got your girl back home https://taskandpurpose.com/military-life/brief-history-jody-original-mr-steal-girl/ https://taskandpurpose.com/military-life/brief-history-jody-...

gandalfthepink 2y ago

She is second best to the worlds truly all rounder person. Johnny Sins.

BobbyTables2 2y ago

I’m amazed my medical websites… The top 5-10 sites all seem have identical wording for common conditions. In the age of copyright enforcement and DMCA antics, I don’t understand how this continues year after year.

grugagag 2y ago
They’re all the same thing, same owners likely
greenavocado 2y ago
All major public facing organizations are slowly bought out by extremely wealthy and influential groups when they get big enough for narrative control purposes because ultimately mind control is the largest source of wealth and power.
geerlingguy 2y ago
I worked in a hospital system for a time—those documents are often integrated through a medical system where the hospital pays a recurring subscription, and the site developers just plug things through an API to display the documents from the central medical system. Thus, you have one document that's identical across dozens or hundreds of different hospital and medical system websites. A long time ago, I held more weight in results from reputable places like Mayo Clinic, but even their site seems to be the same as all the others now.
- azinman2 2y ago
  But is the purchased information not good?
DavidPiper 2y ago
A family member works for a company that writes and publishes a mandatory handbook for GPs in Australia. One day the WHO found them and wholesale copied large chunks of their content verbatim into their online resources without asking or informing. They only found out because THEY went looking on the WHO website for the latest information on something. At that point I started wondering just how much of big companies' work and content is just plagiarism and gratuitous theft from reputable but less visible or popular sources (also highly dependent on country, language, etc). And that was before I discovered hbomberguy on YouTube.

api 2y ago

This kind of spam was already destroying the web before LLMs came along. Now it’s being accelerated by thousands of times. Mainstream web search is probably cooked. Kagi and other niche players might have a chance if the fact that they are not beholden to advertisers lets them introduce features to do things like downrank content with ads. Kagi has “small web” which I think includes this in its weighting. Open social media is probably cooked too. In the future it’s going to require proof of human identity and will be more heavily moderated. The future of social is closed forums. Even those are really having to fight bots though. The other pervasive awful trend of the moment is everything becoming like John Deere tractors: cloud connected, DRMed, with subscriptions and/or planned obsolescence. Capitalism is supposed to reward people for creating value, but today it seems like it’s far easier and more profitable to just extract rent or scam. I am not sure how to fix this.

Terr_ 2y ago
I think we'll end up moving away from shallow signifiers of trustworthiness to reputational networks and evidence someone has invested into an identity or entity. That's not to say it's a solved problem, even in the real world with thousands of years of battle tested strategies. A very simple example would be a web browser where I could blacklist chronically-unhelpful sites, and share that metadata among friends.
keyboardJones 2y ago
My strategy been to put my money where my mouth is and start paying for services that provide value to me (Kagi is one example - I’m a paying customer, and actually found this article using their small web site)
- cal85 2y ago
  Strategy for what?
munificent 2y ago
The hyper-enshittification stages look like: 1. People get on the web and make real content with care because they're just excited to share stuff with each other. 2. Advertisers talk them into putting some ads on their pages so they can get some compensation for their work. 3. Shitty people figure out you can just make content where the main incentive is to get people to go to the page and see the ads. 4. Those people then outsource writing the content to the lowest bidder. 5. The lowest bidder becomes an LLM. 6. Search engines cut out the middle-man entirely and just send your search query to an LLM, stuff some ads in, and show the result to the user without ever hitting the web (except to periodically scrape it for model training). 7. Because of 6, people stop putting new content on the web at all. The models get shittier and stupider with regards to current events. 8. To counter that, LLM companies make deals with news organizations and other primary source information provides and pay them to have direct access to content to train their models. 9. Those organizations get such a large fraction of their income from those deals that eventually they get out of the business of giving human readers direct access to it because it's not worth the effort. Newspapers become B2B companies. 10. The only way to get information is via a handful of giant tech companies sitting on top of huge LLMs saying who-knows-what trained on a slurry of actual information and giant piles of ads. I hope that somewhere in the process people start to get tired of talking to machines all day and hop off the ride entirely and starting calling up their friends and getting information the old fashioned way. The only consolation I have is the belief that people have a deep seated desire to connect to actual humans and know the real truth about the world.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

All of those sites are labeled as "A Venture 4th Media Company" which has such wondrous important content all run by the same "writer" on: https://mtbinsider.com/author/jodie-chiffey/ https://turfandtill.com/author/jodie-chiffey/ https://www.betterwander.com/author/jodie-chiffey/ https://artofgrill.com/author/jodie-chiffey/ https://theathleticfoot.com/author/jodie-chiffey/ https://altprotein.com/team-members/jodie-chiffey/ https://digitalguyde.com/us/ https://total3dprinting.org/author/jodie-chiffey/ Each of which is registered by NameCheap, who can never seem to kick their addiction to bottom feeders. Each of which is behind Cloudflare, the official latrine of planet dysentery. disclosure: I use too.

seanhunter 2y ago
What's interesting is I keep my old blog up even though it is basically never updated. I receive 3 or 4 emails a week from people like Jodie Chiffey saying they would like me to consider hosting a "guest article" by them about some topic or other. The content and SEO mill is absolutely gigantic.

dalemhurley 2y ago

Google has an incentive to keep these links going. Google makes money by you continually returning back to Google. If you get the prefect result on your first click, then you move on with your day. If you get junk, then you go back to Google and click the next junk link and repeat. Each time someone visits one of these content farms and returns back to Google, then it is more advertising dollars for Google.

munificent 2y ago
This is a classic argument and appears in many many forms: * "Psychologists don't want to fix your problems because then you'll stop needing therapy every week." * "Dating sites don't actually want you to find a long-term partner because then you'll stop using the site." * "The mechanic's not trying to actually fix your car, just get it running for a few weeks so it breaks down again and you come back." Etc. etc. Any time there is information asymmetry and leaving a customer not fully satisfied might lead to future sales, this old canard comes up. I'm sure in some cases it's true. But, like, people aren't entirely stupid. Consumers generally won't keep repeatedly going back to the same business if the service is kinda sucky. And businesses generally figure out that reputation matters and the most economically viable long-term strategy is just to give people what they want.
- xyzzy123 2y ago
  Both things can be true at the same time, it depends on the time preference of the business owner.
- roughly 2y ago
  > long-term strategy This is where the theory falls apart. When “long-term strategy” and “short-term quarterly earnings” get into the boardroom together at a public company, it ain’t “long-term strategy” that’s walking out.
  - vineyardmike 2y ago
    It can be though. "Short Term" tends to win when CEO pay is contingent upon hitting certain share price at certain times. Founders tend to not have this issue, and I'm sure other CEOs can have pay packages crafted this way if we desired.

raymondgh 2y ago

Maybe a social endorsement scheme could be an alternative to an invasive proof system.

yen223 2y ago
If there's a social endorsement scheme that doesn't involve real-world identity, I don't see how you won't end up with a situation where Bot_A is counted as legit, being endorsed by Bot_B...Bot_Z
- ms-menardi 2y ago
  because once Bot_J and Bot_Q are discovered to be bots, then everyone they've authenticated suddenly needs new people to vouch for them. problem is, how do you figure out someone's a bot? Ah well maybe someone will make an AI tool for that, we humans are too busy doing groceries and putting round cubes into square holes.
- raymondgh 2y ago
  That kind of verification could be off-protocol. Perhaps a reputation or incentive system could help as well.
  - datadrivenangel 2y ago
    Mission fucking accomplished. [0] 0 - https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
256_ 2y ago
CAs tend to revoke a domain's certificates if it's used for crime. Maybe they should do the same for SEO spam.
vineyardmike 2y ago
Like maybe a website is considered better if it is linked to by other websites? Kinda like research papers... We could call it "Page Rank". I bet we could get a major university (eg. Stanford) to help fund the initial deployment. I think we should call it a really big silly number, like "Gazillion" to emphasize how much it knows. Obviously this won't have ads, and it should make an explicit point to not be evil.... Hmm. I think I've heard this before.

roughly 2y ago

The reason all of this exists - the reason the entire Internet turned into an unusable amalgam of horseshit - is because we built the entire commercial side of the internet off ad revenue. It might be a death spiral at this point - I can’t imagine anyone actually being willing to Pay for whatever the fuck Google or Facebook have become, so there’s nothing left to do but keep inventing new ways to generate bullshit and new bots to view it for you.

foobarboo 2y ago
I pay for Kagi and I have to say it's so worth it. Very fast and no more trash result, a lot of customizability, filters, lenses, etc. They even have an incentive to make my searches worth while since I pay a flatrate.
caseyy 2y ago
The internet is the largest and most elaborate monument to marketing we may ever build.
- flir 2y ago
  Ye of little faith. Some day we'll project that Coca-Cola logo on to the moon.
  - the_sleaze_ 2y ago
    someday we'll sell the edges of our peripheral vision for ad space in lieu of a universal basic income
    - notpachet 2y ago
      Aren't we already doing that?
    - TacticalCoder 2y ago
      > someday we'll sell the edges of our peripheral vision for ad space in lieu of a universal basic income Meta and RayBan are working on that and not far: the RayBans "Meta take a picture" / "Meta take a movie" are a thing. And I doubt very much that it's done with good motives. No HUD yet but they've already got a microphone to analyze your voice (for good reasons, we're sure) and speakers.

acscott 2y ago

The equation to rank links is a poor substitute for an editor. Editors used to be the gateway of information that was disbursed via newspaper, radio, and TV. They were not without fault. So what is the least faulty filter? (Even your own brain, eyes, and ears are faulty, sorry perfectionists.) You cannot trust video or audio now due to deepfakes. What can you trust as a source of information more than 50%? There's still information in the noise, you have to become your own editor.

rileymat2 2y ago
Google originally used back links in the equation; where the goal is to take the information by editors on a massive aggregate to rank. Brilliant until gamed.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

> The only future of the internet is, sadly, proof-of-person and proof-of-residence on every public network interaction. I'm going to be that pedant and point out that the Internet is not the same as the Web, and it's the Web that's sick. The Internet is fine. It's a distinction that matters because the Internet is expensive things like satellites and undersea cables. It's an investment that's too large to just walk away from, so perhaps its future is our future. The Web is just a bunch of conventions about how to use the Internet, it's not binding in any way. We can write a different protocol without laying new cable, we can make it less profitable for abusers, and then we can abandon the sick version that we're currently using.

lupire 2y ago
The post you replied to didn't say anything about the Internet being sick.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
The rest of the internet has even less reputation & ability to assess than the web. Nothing else has links worth a damn, and links while fakeable also do say something sometimes.
caseyy 2y ago
Yes, but we all get what the author means. UDP or TCP, SMTP or HTTP — most of it is transporting low value sludge whose purpose is to exploit its consumers. It involves everything from somewhat benign forms of surveillance/profiling to aggressively malicious scams. You could use the infrastructure for better and many people do. But most of the content on the internet isn’t that.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

frabjoused 2y ago

Has anyone built a search engine that uses LLMs to pre-grade every page with metrics such as: - Commercial bias (content compared to the source, which it learns about) - Insincere motives - Bloat (how many words it takes to say how little to penalize SEO bloat) I would assume that using LLMs, we can get a pretty good idea of what is SEO bloat and who the bad actors are by this point, and just penalize those results.

mvkel 2y ago
We don't need to. We have LLMs now
- frabjoused 2y ago
  I still would like to search and not get the dog crap that is Google's Internet, in addition to using LLMs myself.
  - komali2 2y ago
    Non LLM efforts include alternative and even self hosted search engine indexes. I'm also curious if brave search's concept of "goggles" could work out, where you can write your own indexing logic and share it with others.
    - frabjoused 2y ago
      We don't need self-hosted alternatives (just like the computer market doesn't need Linux tinkerers) as much as we need a real formidable competitor to dethrone Google and create proper website incentives so the Internet stops sucking. We need SEO companies to realize they will go out of business if they continue to generate crap filler content for their clients. We know Google won't do it. We need influence. We need effective results. Self-hosted is cute but ineffective at best, selfish at worst.
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago

hamasho 2y ago

I often google Reddit posts to find products or services. Posts with a lot of comments usually have better solutions. I also check out YouTube reviews, especially ones with few dislikes, using addons like "Return YouTube Dislike." These methods are easy and pretty reliable. But it means the platform will soon be flooded with bot-generated spam.

keyboardJones 2y ago
Once I heard of ReplyGuy, I knew it was the beginning of the end for forums like Reddit
- germinator 2y ago
  It's actually one of the perks of centralized platforms like Reddit: if they want to, they have the technology and the resources to investigate bad actors like that. I don't just mean just finding and blocking their IPs, but untangling their ownership, corporate structure, tooling, and so on. Hiring actual PIs if necessary. It's the bread-and-butter for many spam and abuse teams at Big Tech. That said, just because they can doesn't mean they will. It's possible that they've grown complacent and underfunded these capabilities (instead relying on community moderators to weed out bad actors). Or it's possible that they're too focused on the short term to see the existential risks. If I recall correctly, they couldn't resist the temptation of selling user content for LLM training, same as Stack Overflow. But in an internet overrun by spam LLMs, the future are curated, walled-garden communities, and Reddit could be the basis for that.
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    Anything which diminishes their usage numbers won't look good for investors, so one should assume no action will be taken by the company which diminishes their usage numbers.

256_ 2y ago

Sometimes I think about whether a nation-state may have an incentive to solve this problem. They could adopt a strict anti-SEO spam policy for their ccTLD and run a publicity campaign telling people about it, so they'd filter search results to that ccTLD, with the purpose of improving the country's reputation (by associating it with high-quality search results). That sounds kind of far-fetched, but it's hard to think of anything else. Maybe you could direct the blame at CAs too. For now, at least we can still put "before:2020" in our search queries.

porksoda 2y ago

How bad does it have to get before it stops working, I mean like phone a friend brittanica yellow pages bad? Quicker and more deeply we get there, the more effort and traction gets behind some breakout solution. Maybe it's just pure cynicism: burn it all. Remember email spam? It got so bad, that we fixed it. I mean email has its issues and how but spam isn't one of them. I built a spam juggernaught in my day (got bills don't I :)) and I feel like I contributed a tiny bit to our almost-spamless latter days. Progress! The world is on the march.

noobermin 2y ago
Did you accidentally post the same thing twice or are you making some meta point on spam.

porksoda 2y ago

jprete 2y ago
I find personal email to be almost useless for anything other than mailing lists and online shopping messages. I don't consider it fixed; we already left it to burn.
- parpfish 2y ago
  I use email constantly but I can’t tell you the last time I saw actual spam in my inbox Sure, there are occasional unwanted marketing emails but those are easily dispatched with unsubscribe and/or inbox filters
  - brabel 2y ago
    Depends on your provider. My GMail is fine, but my much older Hotmail is a spam cesspool. It's so bad I barely check it anymore the last couple of years, despite having been able to keep that email address since something like 1996. As I had "exposed" that to some email farms I probably got into some really bad spammers lists which Microsoft seems unable to stop.
    - Aromasin 2y ago
      I gave up on my Hotmail completely quite recently for the same reason. It seemed to just stop filtering altogether. I'd recieve somewhere on the order of 50 spam emails to my main inbox a day. If anything, it filtered more email I did want than those I didn't. I haven't had the same issue with gmail.

necovek 2y ago

While I understand the frustration of the author in searching the web today (I do too), I am not sure how they get to: > We end up with real time global access from “low trust low income max exploitation because who is going to stop us” wankers to “high trust high income low questioning” societies and everything falls apart. Obviously, there are "low trust high income max exploitation" folks doing the damage too, as one of the linked articles talks about frauds with wiring large sums (in 100ks of dollars) into Hong Kong, which is itself an expensive city. Similarly, from the other direction, you've got high-income communities "exploiting" lower-income communities by getting cheaper labour (like getting things produced in China) — paying less than they would locally for the same or larger work effort. The solution to this is obviously global equalization of salary bands, which is well under way due to an ability to do a lot of highly paid work remotely and globalization in general — but it will take some time (and it's also why China is becoming less appealing in particular: salaries are going up there as well). But that will lead to a new set of problems altogether.

m463 2y ago

I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row. I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru. Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I’m bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge. I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don’t perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat 400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me. I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me. I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis. But I have not yet gone to college. - well known missive from decades ago

neilv 2y ago
Thanks, I've not seen that college application essay in ages, and it's written better than most of what I've read since. https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/sj/i-am-a-dynamic-figure/ https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/sj/i-am-a-dynamic-figure/

friend_and_foe 2y ago

I was nodding my head as a member of the choir until > The only future of the internet is, sadly, proof-of-person and proof-of-residence on every public network interaction Yeah, go away. The problem is that Google has monopolized web aggregation. Without it these sites wouldn't be worth making. I've got to show ID to post something online to kick that can down the road? The way I see it this is a self resolving problem. Ad driven search engines rank ad driven blog spam, people get tired of it and use methods of finding content that don't show that garbage, these guys, along with their multinational trillion dollar benefactor, go out of business. Problem solved.

vineyardmike 2y ago
> Yeah, go away. The problem is that Google has monopolized web aggregation. Without it these sites wouldn't be worth making. So how will you find things? > Ad driven search engines rank ad driven blog spam We don't have actual concrete proof that Google (or others) rank content with ads higher because of the ads. As a contrary corollary, generally as society grows, we've seen an increase in "proof-of-person and proof-of-residence on every public X". Want welfare checks or charity, prove yourself. Want to buy cough syrup or booze, prove yourself. Want to drive, want to shoot a gun, want to XXXX.... get an ID. In early America, men used to vote by everyone going into a big room and shouting for a while (some minor exaggeration). Now you have to register in advance and show ID, and they maintain registries of everyone and their affiliated party. Showing identity comes with a lack of trust, and volume + anonymity decreases trust as it's slowly abused.
- friend_and_foe 2y ago
  Look, there's a difference between showing ID to vote or get a free paycheck from someone and showing ID to shout my ideas from a rooftop. I don't need your trust to say things on the internet. If you don't trust me, don't read what I have to say. You can continue trusting Google though, I won't, this is a bait and switch and they're the source of the problem, not your lack of my identifying documents. We have no proof that they're doing it in purpose, I don't care about the intent, I care about the results. How do I find things. I'm already living life without much google in it. There are a lot of ways to find things. Aggregators like this one have a better signal to noise ratio than google or most places that publish a lot of information. There are search engines that actively blacklist anything with SEO in it. There are community groups that focus on topics of interest. I find that I only use big search engines nowadays to find a git repo for something or find out what time some place closes, that's all they're good for nowadays. I trust people more than faceless services, and I don't care anything about who any of those people are in real life.

udev4096 2y ago

I have never come across "AI generated" content in duckduckgo

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago

Time to go back to Yahoo! search engine with manually added and verified links. Automated web crawling experiment has failed. Anyway, whatever I search, I end up in either reddit or wikipedia (incidentally, both are human-curated stores of knowledge).

brabel 2y ago
I don't know about Wikipedia, but Reddit is full of bots. They're sophisticated enough you may not recognize some comments are not from a human though. That's worse than when it was always obvious.
- wildrhythms 2y ago
  Not just Reddit; Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, (basically every social media)... full of bots posting and replying to each other. Dead Internet Theory.

sebtron 2y ago

> The only future of the internet is, sadly, proof-of-person and proof-of-residence on every public network interaction. I really hope we do not give up the internet's freedom as they suggest (and I doubt this would solve the spam problem).

fxtentacle 2y ago
As much as I hate the idea, I'm convinced it would be a godsent for 99% of the population. Just imagine when you buy your SIM card the phone shop asks you: Do you want to limit incoming calls to people who you either called before or who have ever had a permanent residence in your country? 99% of spam and scam calls blocked, just like that. And just imagine how hilarious it would be if all those Nigerian prince emails had a note that says "actually, the sender of this email has never been to Nigeria"
- groestl 2y ago
  > actually, the sender of this email has never been to Nigeria Conversely, what if all those emails actually originate from Nigeria? Would it make them more legit?
  - anovikov 2y ago
    They actually indeed originate from Nigeria almost all of the time.
    - groestl 2y ago
      That's what I'm hinting at :)
- sebtron 2y ago
  99% of the population is also happy with carrying a spyware device everywhere and allowing Google to know everything you do in order to serve you better ads. I am not saying this does not have upsides, but it would be a nightmare to have it imposwd on you.

smusamashah 2y ago

There was another article here on HN some time ago on how big media publishers are littering the web with spam recommendations https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39433451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39433451 (https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/ https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/) This listed review spam from Dotdash Meredith which I used a clue to search and block all sites by them using uBlacklist. Edit: Found another article saying the same thing there are only few big media giant's dominating search https://detailed.com/google-control/ https://detailed.com/google-control/

phillias 2y ago

Who are you protecting? Those who would be duped by it? Are you trying to get rid of salesman? Responding to a dark market with authoritative measures means you're trying to protect suckers. You can't stop people from being victimized. An evolutionary response is the only solution. A graceful decline of suckers is the solution. Do not try to protect them, they will only hate you for it.

pdonis 2y ago

I don't see this issue the way the author of this article does. Both the stated problem and the stated solution seem overblown to me. First, what jumped out at me when I read the article was that I had never heard of Jodie Chiffey before reading the article. I don't see all the trash the author is talking about because I don't spend any time on websites that promote it, or dealing with spam emails from sources of it, etc., etc. I can get along just fine with simply ignoring the existence of all the trash and going to websites (like this one) that I actually want to go to. And how am I able to go to websites like this one without being overwhelmed by trash? Because (a) this website is managed by actual people who aren't interested in spamming me, and (b) HTTPS means I know that when I go to "news.ycombinator.com" I am going to a site managed by those people. In other words, we already have the actual solution to the "how do I avoid the trash" problem, and have had it for decades. We do not need to build a huge new spyware infrastructure to "fix" the web. We already have, and are using, the tools we need to avoid the trash.

kellyfaraway 2y ago

I apologize for not having a solution or complaint here. The discussion is mostly over my head. I just want to point out Matt.sh apparently missed that Jodie’s a hardcore gamer and gaming expert as well as a trusted advisor to senior citizens. She also “… doesn’t want to hold back when it comes to getting the word out about affiliate marketing,” and will teach you her tricks. She is an avid toy insider too, loves toys from the 80’s. Not that bad looking either.