TechTakes

1430 readers

164 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

110

Fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains (arstechnica.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 49 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I stand by my opinion that SEO basically ruined the internet. First keyword optimization made me scroll through seventeen paragraphs of someone's life story before getting to a recipe for boiled eggs, and now this.

Why would someone go to the trouble of making a law firm out of NameCheap, stock art, and AI images (and seemingly copy) to send quasi-legal demands to site owners? Backlinks, that's why.

Oof, back in the day all we had to do was write a nice email to get someone to put a backlink to our page into the sidebar of their Geocities page.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago (1 children)

i remember back in the day they had white on white tiny keywords on the bottom of pages. it was ridiculous. then google started to check if the text was visible 🤣

the shenanigans will never end unless you have actual faithful people curating it and google absolutely won't have it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Reject search engines, return to webrings/directories

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

remember when sites used to get slashdotted

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

I think you mean it made the Internet MORE AWESOME and ACCELERATING THE ~~CAPITALISM~~ ACAUSAL ROBOT GOD. How else can we get the singularity if we don't have devs getting at least 300K compensation packages?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I remember being like 14yo and learning that "SEO specialist" is a fucking job title. Even then I was like, that sounds like a fake job, what's the fucking value of that?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Yeah I remember being struck by that too, but then I worked in "business" and there's a ton of weird stuff people do for a living (productively, for some late-stage capitalism value of productive). It just happened to intrude into the there-to cozy world of the web.