Digg’s open beta shuts down after just two months, blaming AI bot spam

Comments

• brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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, fucking up literally everything.

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  • W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨16⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    Which Futurama movie so I can rewatch?

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  • daychilde@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨49⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      No, you’ve got a point… Actually you’re right. To an extent.

      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 small genuine services is fine. It’s definitely not; it’s a miracle any business is surviving as a pure web app anymore.

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    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      SEO is one reason that’s less common.

      No it isn’t. SEO is about faming 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.

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  • rainwall@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Bill hicks had it right.

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    • postmateDumbass@lemmy.world ⁨33⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      Drink Coke.

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  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

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

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    • TheFogan@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I mean it’s worth saying that the new bots are kind of a different league to the old bots.

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    • panda_abyss@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      But now bots pass captcha and use a real browser. So… it’s not easy removing them.

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    • ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      And the majority of posts were mrbabyman.

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• ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Dead internet theory reality

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• FistingEnthusiast@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Their tolerance of racism and bigotry was why I left

  It seemed like every shitty person wanted to make it a far-right safe place

  I’m glad it failed

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  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨35⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    those were the bots

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• Sat@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I tried using it and was kinda hopeful, but NSFW was against their TOS which is a no go.

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  • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Not on my wholesome christian server /s

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    • Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      *Holesome 😏

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• BigJohnnyHines@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  People are naive to think there aren’t also thousands of bots here in the Fediverse.

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  • IcePee@lemmy.beru.co ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Grail@multiverse.soulism.net ⁨16⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      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.

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    • rimu@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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• ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Wasn’t AI part of their “selling” point?

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  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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

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    • ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I mean, reddit only got big because Digg made some very stupid moves before, so … pretty on brand

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• devolution@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Man. I liked Digg. Not as much as Lemmy, but I liked it.

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  • W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨14⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    I liked Digg right up until they folded like a cheap suit over the HD DVD decryption key.

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• etherphon@piefed.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  One of the complaints I had about the place was how AI positive it was, I guess that explains it.

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• ApollosArrow@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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• XLE@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Ladies and gentlemen, this is democracy democratization manifest.

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  • W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨14⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    Are you waiting to accept my limp comment?

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• Hiro8811@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Ah man, I applies for the beta months ago but never gotten a response. For those who manages to enter how was it? Was it a Lemmy/reddiy style or more like Instagram/Facebook.

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  • kinkles@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It was basically exactly Reddit but with two noticeable AI features that were easy to ignore:

    1. An AI-generated summary of popular posts on the homepage
    2. Underneath every link post to an article was an AI summary, but on the app it was a collapsible section so collapsing it in one post would keep it collapsed for all.

    I found the second one slightly handy, though, because when I was on Reddit I fell into the bad habit of posting after just reading headlines. With the AI summaries I could get more context and it often lead me to opening more articles than I would have without it.

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  • dil@piefed.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It was okay during closed beta, more dead than here, but similar.

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  • daychilde@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I found it boring and mostly dead. Most links had a dozen comments at most, almost all of them very short and very few of them thoughtful at all.

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• kinkles@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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  • cabbage@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Skavau@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It was overall, less active than the Fediverse.

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    • kinkles@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Not noticing it doesn’t mean it’s not there.

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    • kinkles@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Isn’t that the best we can ask for nowadays though?

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  • lazycouchpotato@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Didn’t spend a lot of time there but my experience was similar. Didn’t notice any spam, but activity was sparse.

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