They’re doing it wrong. Use crypto for login and charge user for every single resource used. Problem solved
damn you think they would have just used cloud flare click on the bus
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 messing up literally everything.
“Oh, but discoverability of small business!” Yeah… fuck that. The Futurama movie was right.
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.
I love that entire series. 🫶
The majority of “new users” was bots twenty years ago. How was this news to these chuckleheads?
And the majority of posts were mrbabyman.
But now bots pass captcha and use a real browser. So… it’s not easy removing them.
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
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.
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.
Fuck that, bring back boolean operators!!!
¿Por qué no los dos?
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.
It… yeah gota be more then good at writing a google search. It’s a practice for sure if using like “LLMs” for info grabs and auto blog skimming.
yum
:) your interwebers journey began the same year I was born. I didnt join in these “dark places” tell about the year 2000.
Well, internet in 1994, but I was on BBSes from 1987. heh.
No harm in coming along later. You’ll get to see the cool shit (and… shitty shit) after I’m gone :)
haha😄 .
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.
I agree with this statement whole heartily.
Dead internet
theoryrealityblaming? 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.
they are just hoping to datamine JUST like reddit to profit of its user, but worst. a corporate structure like diggs wouldnt eventually want to use AI so they can sell the data to GOOGLE, or other large AI to train on.
Haha … … slop?
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.
I think I had blocked maybe one or two of the default communities very early on, and after that I hadn’t noticed any spam. I used the app at least once a day since the open beta started. Whatever they were doing to combat the bots appeared to be working. It’s a huge shame they thought otherwise and shut down.
Didn’t spend a lot of time there but my experience was similar. Didn’t notice any spam, but activity was sparse.
How was it? Did it feel lively?
I just checked the front page a couple of times out of curiosity, but I never bothered really checking it out too much. I was always surprised how dead it looked from the outside, but that might have been the wrong impression.
That’s interesting and I missed that post, thanks!
It can be easy to lose track of how successful the fediverse already is, as the number of users will remain negligible compared to mainstream platforms for a really long time and possibly forever. Seeing how it easily outperforms a major player like Digg trying to re-establish themselves puts things into perspective.
Maybe they’ll relaunch as a piefed instance, lol
I was thinking the same thing when I read this:
A small but determined team is stepping up to rebuild with a completely reimagined angle of attack. Positioning Digg as simply an alternative to incumbents wasn’t imaginative enough. That’s a race we were never going to win. What comes next needs to be genuinely different.
Small team, completely reimagined, not simply an alternative, genuinely different… They are describing a federated instance.
It was active enough that there was new content every day. Checking multiple times a day I’d see the same stuff but I saw that as a positive that kept me from wasting too much time.
Did it have niche communities that had successfully moved over, but that were not featured on the front page?
Sorry if it’s a stupid question, I just always had the impression I didn’t understand what I was looking at and now it’s gone and I’m genuinely curious.
It had some, yeah. Maybe not “successfully moved” per-say but they were there. I never really got a chance to dig into them very much but I was a member of the /spongebob community and it had some sincere activity from people who wanted to grow it into something fun and engaging.
My community is a niche one Albumartworksheaven. It took me a month to have more followers on digg than here in 6 months. My community was featured twice
Oooh, neat community! Joined!
I guess that’s one benefit of a smaller site - if you put down the effort in it, it stands out more. But community discovery is absolutely a challenge.
I don’t think many of the niche communities really had time to thrive, since people were trying to build up a lot of the main ones. I think some were starting to just get traction, which could be a reason why they chose now, stopping before it really got away from them.
Not noticing it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Isn’t that the best we can ask for nowadays though?
Don’t lower your bar.
I didn’t notice the spam and I was quite happy using the new Digg, so I don’t exactly know what you think I should have been doing differently.
To reiterate, my points are:
- You just didn’t notice the bots
- You should always advocate for less slop
These things need to grow from grassroots.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is
democracydemocratization manifest.Are you waiting to accept my limp comment?
That reminds me, 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
lol I still have a screenshot of Digg from when every article on the home page had this key in it.
Did they really demand a key be removed like . Ehhh this why you should use cryptographic tokenization, non static securities… . Ehhh lol.
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.
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.
Please share.
breh why is this going around the net… 🥺gahat is this… 🤣
Its good that you have enough self-control to hand over your keys when you’ve had too much to drink.
LOL.
Apparently you can get that sequence from an AI bot if you ask it “correctly”. But rules for thee and all that.
Straight off to jail with you!
For those who don’t remember this- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy
oh wow that is dumb you are right.
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.
That’s not Japanese, there’s some Chinese and Korean characters in there too. Turns out if you decode random bytes as UTF chars you will probably get a CJK character lol
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.
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.
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…
I think I had read somewhere that they would eventually have ads, but that may have just been member speculation.
Maybe if they go down the Apollo route they could have some sub tiers, but we’ll see.
Man. I liked Digg. Not as much as Lemmy, but I liked it.
I liked Digg right up until they folded like a cheap suit over the HD DVD decryption key.
folded like a cheap suit
Funnier because of all the T-shirts printed with that key on them.
I had one.
The what? I’m ignorant here.
Going off memory here, but I’m pretty sure someone posted the master decryption key, without any context. Just, ‘123cf7’…etc.
Without any context, it’s just a random string of letters and numbers. Absolutely free speech. With context, it’s a violation of the DMCA.
They missed an opportunity there. Could have pivot something similar to moltbook.
Wasn’t AI part of their “selling” point?
Right? Weren’t they making some AI podcast or something as well?
None of that sounded good.
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
I mean, reddit only got big because Digg made some very stupid moves before, so … pretty on brand
Reddit was doing fine before the influx from Digg. That’s one of the reasons people migrated to reddit in the first place - because it was already viable. That said, it was an influx of users, for sure.
It was better before the influx from Digg imo
“we’re reddit, but with AI!”
I noped so hard away from digg
Doesn’t reddit already have ai?
Ai HyperFictional. Don’t get lost in allat.
well duh, reddit/X/Insta, MEta,etc is infested by AI BOT/bot spammers for a while to spread propaganda or do things like promote links of OF, or other businesses. thats the other reason why they are very ban heavy as of late. diggs or any other platform would suffer the same fate.
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.
