Didn’t you have to buy an account at Digg? If so, were the bots buying the accounts? And if so, who was buying them?
No you just had to request the account and then one would be provided to you when they open it up. I finally received my account a couple months ago. It was worse than it is here. I was hoping for some good alternatives to Reddit but overall Lemmy is only halfway there digg was only a third of the way there.
blaming? shouldnt they have celebrated how much people utilize their beloved slopmachines?
Dude an idiotic thing is one of the biggest sellers for dig was their stupid AI slop notifications that helped tell you what the article was about. I fucking hated that so much.
That reminds me, 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
Straight off to jail with you!
For those who don’t remember this- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy
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.
lol I still have a screenshot of Digg from when every article on the home page had this key in it.
They should bring back google circles
Unironically. But only on the condition they bring back Google from 2011
These things need to grow from grassroots.
OH NO! But how? They resurrected Kevin Rose for this! /s
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.
Basically this, yes haha
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.
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.
I paid 5 bucks for a founder badge. I’ve spent more on poorer decisions but that only reduces the sting a little.
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.
They’re doing it wrong. Use crypto for login and charge user for every single resource used. Problem solved
deleted by creator
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.
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.
Fuck that, bring back boolean operators!!!
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.
¿Por qué no los dos?
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.
No, you’ve got a point… Actually you’re right. To an extent.
I should have qualified my post.
But I’d argue the “bad” part of SEO is just too tempting. It’s clearly winning out, across the entire internet, unless you can look at me with a straight face and say “Google search is fine.” Or that discoverability of genuine services is fine. It’s definitely not; it’s a miracle any legitimate business is surviving from web search anymore, amongts the sea of attention scams and corporate behemoths.
In other words, the I feel like the “honeymoon” where we could trust SEO to happen ethically is now behind us.
You also have a point. HOW DARE WE AGREE. :)
Well, except that I think that - to a decent extent - the changing requirements for SEO generally have still improved it. I’m comparing to the days of keyword stuffing, which doesn’t work anymore, for example. Nowadays, it does have to be text that flows and is somewhat natural.
THAT said, I will myself point to recipe sites that give you a novel before the recipe for SEO purposes. I’m certainly not saying it’s perfect by any means.’
The results are awful though. Over the past few years, I can hardly even think of a single search where SEO quickly brought me to “the page I was looking for”; searches end in either a wall of spam, or me getting frustrated and more directly finding what I already know I want. Smaller sites I used to love have withered and died, buried from the lack of earnest traffic. Malicious URLs rise above the businesses they are copying.
In other words, what does it matter if SEO is “improved” if the results are junk? It’s clearly not working better, unless one’s a scammer, or a corporation that benefits from the consolidation.
Which Futurama movie so I can rewatch?
Bender’s Big Score, the first one. I was thinking of the scammer aliens, who have that same attitude SEO folks tend to carry.
Drink Coke.
The majority of “new users” was bots twenty years ago. How was this news to these chuckleheads?
I mean it’s worth saying that the new bots are kind of a different league to the old bots.
Yeah, so it REALLY SHOULDN’T BE A SURPRISE
But now bots pass captcha and use a real browser. So… it’s not easy removing them.
And the majority of posts were mrbabyman.
Dead internet
theoryrealitywell 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.
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.
I tried using it and was kinda hopeful, but NSFW was against their TOS which is a no go.
Prude and ambicious. Executives these days…
RIP lemmynsfw.
It’s back as an archive and a new instance though.
What’s the new instance? I must have missed it.
Fedinsfw.app
Not on my wholesome christian server /s
*Holesome 😏
People are naive to think there aren’t also thousands of bots here in the Fediverse.
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.
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 become overwhelmed from bots if they have lax sign-up requirements (already happened a few times), which vastly limits their ability to take hold.
The bigger problem for us, I think, is the fight against bot 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.
the moderation and comment moderation history is nice but it is sort of hidden. that would be nicer if it was more intuitively inline. Also did you mean “bot scrapers” rather than “not scrapers”. And I have been toying with the idea, what about ai or bot supported pipelines, accept that they are part of the visitors, provide it optimized data, and then restrict ui/ux heavy processes to stricter rate limits per second, etc…sort of like a robots txt v2 or something
It’s less hidden for admins. Whenever we click on a user’s profile, there’s a button that can take us directly to their individual mod-log history, which can help us quickly see if there’s a history of AI or bot spam behavior that was spotted by other admins/mods.
Also did you mean “bot scrapers”
Agh, auto correct got me. Yes, I meant bot scrapers.
As for the robots.txt v2 idea, I’m not sure that would be very effective or popular amongst admins, as I think most would prefer not to give it any data if possible, and even with reduced rates, there would probably still be enough bots and queries to present a significant issue.
I think there have been some experiments with ‘trapping’ bots in a recursive loop that they don’t realize is a loop, and therefore can’t escape, but I’m not sure how effective those have been.
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.
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.
As expected. Did you find a vBulletin message board from 25 years ago with a specific solution tho?
Removed by mod
For someone who likes digging around in my Reddit history you’d think you’d be able to find something that was actually relevant to the topic at hand. That was a comment about the uses of agentic coding tools for making custom applications, not about building bots.
Yeah, well, I judge you for participating in all those scat and cuck subreddits.
DISCLAIMER: This is a joke. I haven’t stalked them on reddit. Just being silly and want that to be clear. :)
Stop being a weirdo or go start a tech company so your behaviour is at least expected.
Fuck the anti-AI crowd is getting extreme. So much harassment and doxxing going on by these losers.
And it’s not even relevant, using an LLM to vibecode apps is completely different to using LLMs to make posts on social media. Just blind rage.
This particular user is a special kind of one. Once you make the wrong noises about something they don’t like, they make it their personal mission to start digging for anything even remotely looking like dirt that they can sling your way - as they’re now demonstrating below.
I couldn’t imagine being that bored.
It’s linked in his public profile.
Edit: Speaking of blind rage, I hope you downvoted this accidentally…
If there are, theyre not very active
I’ve been noticing a lot more definitely-AI-generated “blogposts” and full-on ads in my Mastodon hashtag feeds.
It’s a fairly new thing.
75% of the accounts I’ve had to ban in the roughly-two-years since I spun up my instance have been AI slopfaucets that popped up in the last 2 weeks.
I wonder if there is any inherent defence against slop on Lemmy. I guess if an instance doesn’t prune it’s user base of bots, shills and other slop merchants, it could be black listed by other admins of other instances.
No, but there is on PieFed.social. Mods and admins have functionality to check any post or comment for LLM-generated text. There’s more stuff too.
Generally I share my findings with Lemmy admins so they can ban the account.
I think this is a pretty big threat to the fediverse and social media in general and am taking it very seriously. At the moment the amount of slop is pretty low but we need to be ready for the deluge when it comes.
check any post or comment for LLM-generated text
Presumably with about the same tools that gleefully give false positives when checking school assignments.
This may come as a surprise to you so brace yourself.
I am not stupid.
Well, firstly, I’ve seen the Piefed code.
Secondly, I doubt it that you have some magical accurate AI-detection tools, and Digg and Reddit don’t.
Your AI detection tools are really helpful, thanks for all your hard work.
My instance bans non-consensual AI content and users. Rimu’s tools have made that a lot easier to do, I get an alert when the system detects a possible AI user.
