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.

Which Futurama movie so I can rewatch?

Bill hicks had it right.

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

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.

Right, but isn't Lemmy itself a bit of a "less features" version of Reddit? I'm not here for features, I'm here to get away from toxic Reddit mods because fuck spez.

I'll admit, I might have taken the bet that "reddit but not reddit" would hold at least some interest.

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.

Not on my wholesome christian server /s

RIP lemmynsfw.

those were the bots

Straight off to jail with you!

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

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

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

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.