#algorithmic content

[virtueisdead]

i feel like a lot of people would benefit from what i did, being just deleting all apps that use algorithms and only using privacy frontends. like you can't use corporate apps and expect not to get subjected to the corporate ground spikes that are attempts at subliminal influence and surveillance marketing. you kinda just gotta make the call to get rid of it or get with it. and i know which one im picking

like i just stopped using any official youtube client because the algorithmic sludge is so insufferable. i just use newpipe and invidious because they just do what i fucking ask. search something? heres results. look at the feed? heres a chronological list of the latest uploads by every channel youre subscribed to. also have an extremely useful and simple download button and all sorts of other shit in the simplest easiest to use package ever. highly recommend stopping using platforms that algorithmically suggest AND deliver content. i would recommend either not using the former at all or keeping them strictly seperate.

[mias-back-from-the-dead]

tbh i think the funniest phenomena that's been happening in the last couple years is "youtuber, having gone too deep into the research hole, has been made an investigative journalist against their will"

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.

A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."

Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg

The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.

Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.

This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:

https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936

There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:

https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:

https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/

All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:

https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/

As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.

A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).

Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.

Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.

As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:

https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425

As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.

All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.

Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/

This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html

Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:

https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150

But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.

It cheated.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Image: freezelight (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[sergle]

that post about the tiktok ban where op is genuinely going "i'm really surprised that they aren't even considering moving to tumblr" cracks my shit UP!! why don't the people on the Video-Specific social media want to move to the mostly-text microblogging social media... also everyone on tumblr is always talking about how much they hate tiktok and that it's ruining society (bc the userbase is aging out of being able to accept new things)

[bleaksqueak]

It is so unbelievably frustrating how the algorithm timeline keeps defaulting in a place that has been free of algo bullshit for so long. I cannot tell if it’s a glitch or if they’re just pushing it intentionally. It’s at least easy to go back to the following feed, but with bluesky users more and more depending on the discover feed and tumblr defaulting to the algorithm timeline it just feels like ‘be twitter’ is the shitty destiny being pushed everywhere.

Important video anyone should give a watch:

[thechekhov]

[sad-endings-suck]

“ew no, 😫 i hate that ship!”

okay?? so go cry about it. tf you want from me?

[barkhoffman]

not to be an extremist or anything but people who make a post about a character and then tag every other character even if those characters aren't in the post at all should be put in saw traps

[virtueisdead]

tumblr is the only corporate social im willing to use at this point, purely because of how vastly different it is from its contemporaries, structurally and culturally, but they're very clearly doing something that is quickly turning me away. for lack of less sensitive term, staff is practically gentrifying the platform. (forcing shit from other socials that tumblrs lack of were the only reason i still used it)

given i use spacehey daily, im sure youre already aware that im not a big fan of the contemporary concept of the "social media". i wont go on my whole pedantic/esoteric rant about distinguishing the definition of a social media and a social network because thats a whole other essay for another time and its not worth the argument given im already trying to discuss something else at the moment. (ive literally written a research paper about this because i seriously am that obnoxious about the subject)

so; one of the most substantial changes that happened to social websites in general over the past 2 decades was the introduction of algorithmic feeds. for those unaware, tumblr is in fact the very last major social platform that still doesnt operate (primarily) off of algorithmic content, and this is direly important to the continued use it receives from older bloggers. the majority of people who regularly use tumblr today and have for years are still here because it is the last bastion of chronological dashboards. this also plays a huge role in why theres such a dramatically different atmosphere on tumblr compared to other platforms.

reblogs are literally the only way that things can "go viral". posts do not ever spread if people dont actively decide "i want to share this with my friends" and hit the reblog button, as well if their friends dont think the same. whats especially important is that this system is entirely end-viewer-oriented; it does not particularly favor reactionary content like an algorithm does. on a platform like twitter, any kind of engagement at all (replies, likes, qrts, etc) will be taken by the algorithm as an indication that the post is likely to resonate with people in some way, regardless of whether the post in question is receiving positive or negative engagement, and regardless of whether or not it is thoughtful or warrants that- not to mention how this problem is even further exacerbated by the character limits on microblogging social media platforms like twitter.

so people love tumblr for the fact that posts that you wouldnt share with your friends simply will not garner any popularity most of the time. this fosters a far more unique and interesting community and types of viral content, but youll notice that a little while ago, tumblr quietly added the "for you" page. realistically, nobody who actually has used tumblr since before that tab was added would ever even touch it because it is a spit in the face of what makes people love the platform. but they they knew most people dont vocally give a shit like i do.

the first problem arises when you consider that new users from places like tiktok and twitter will naturally assume the tab was always there and likely use it as their primary means of discovery. they wont learn or understand the way that the proper system tumblr uses of follows and reblogs actually works, which is steadily creating an enormous and frankly insurmountable divide between new and old users of the platform. its already fostering the kinds of passive interaction from people who dont understand tumblr's mechanics that is honestly genuinely harmful to the community overall. people misusing the tools that the platform has due to not understanding their function or assuming similarity to things they already know from other platforms. honestly, this in itself would not even be that much of an issue because we could simply ignore the new users who refuse to make the effort to understand how to use the app and fall for the advertising trap that is the for you page...

but the problem is getting way bigger as tumblr is slowly but surely pushing the "for you" page onto other dashboards. youll see posts with a little "based on your likes" banner at the top crop up more and more. theyre quite literally trying to subtly force an algorithm into place where there wasnt one before. (ive been made aware you actually can turn this off from within an entirely seperate settings menu from the regular one that you open on the notifications screen for some reason?? the fact that i didnt even know this after using tumblr for this long is wild, but it doesnt invalidate my argument in that they turned it on automatically without asking or telling users) its not egregious enough to make me leave yet but its definitely been happening more and more frequently to the point that i am seriously doubting if i should consider continuing to use the website/app. this is the biggest structural issue, but its not the only example of what im talking about where tumblr is trying to pretend to be like other contemporary social medias in order to lure in new users without teaching them how things work so that they can use them as advertising guinea pigs.

another example would be the abrupt and frankly pointless introduction of tumblr live, which is entirely unnecessary and has received near unanimous criticism from older users. but a bigger one is something that a lot of people, especially newer users, mobile only users, or those straight other platforms have probably not even noticed- the completely silent removal of subdomain urls. (which is why people here call usernames urls in the first place) this one is way more apparent of an issue as far as my questionable use of the term 'gentrification' goes.

if i asked you the question "what is tumblr?" what would you say? more than likely, you would answer that its a social media- and to be clear, you would certainly not be incorrect in that assessment, but thats not the important part. as far as i can see, thats the first thing that comes to mind when they think of what tumblr "is" in its contemporary state. but if i asked somebody that a decade ago, they would likely give a completely different answer; they would say its a "blogging site". that's because fundamentally, that's what tumblr actually is and is supposed to be. a social blogging host platform. the dashboard and tumblr.com screen was always only half of it as far as the functionality went.

everyone used to have a personal website for their blogs, and people would often hook their tumblr blog up with its own custom domain as well. tumblr was first and foremost simply a blogging platform with social elements. while that subdomain (personal website) functionality does still exist, and you can see it on my blog because i customized my blog's css themes, they actually completely silently added a switch that gets rid of it, and they automatically turned it off for anyone that hadnt fully configured that page already which slowly consolidates everybody towards the exact same uniform tumblr-blog style like what you see on the mobile site. it forces a uniform visual aesthetic and functionality, which is one of the things i hate the most. in the first place, the enormous number of people who hadnt set up their page properly is largely because tumblr has for a few years now actively discouraged, hidden, or obfuscated the 'personal website' aspect of the service for whatever reason they may have using a method ill get into in a moment. it may be because they thought it was too convoluted for newer internet users who dont understand, or it may have been a more calculated effort to abandon older infrastructure and replace it with replicas of more contemporary systems like are used in other social medias, but it doesnt make a difference to me.

blogging is all about self-expression, and restricting that defeats the point so fucking hard. on the mobile app, my page will look something like this.

though this screenshot is taken on desktop. the url here is "https://www.tumblr.com/virtueisdead". this is an entirely separate and pretty recently added functionality called the profile view, which is entirely different from how the website used to operate, which is demonstrated for clearly by the fact that this is not what my blog is actually supposed to look like. in fact, you cant even see what blogs are supposed to look like on the mobile app at all. if you open your browser and go to my actual blog url, "https://virtueisdead.tumblr.com/", you can see the intended design, which is very similar to my spacehey profile.

im honestly not unconvinced that they intend to eventually completely distinguish the old blogging system (akin to wordpress and blogger) from the social media aspect of the site entirely, though thats more of a crack theory. the fact remains that they began to silently get rid of people's actual blog pages, slowly forcing uniformity with the mobile app. (this is less important, but another part of that that drives me up the fucking wall is that i cant even use the tumblr website in my main browser anymore. they made it so it only works in certain browsers, and im sure i dont need to explain why that is absolutely insufferable behavior)

tumblr is absolutely trying to mimic other social media platforms like tiktok and twitter in order to attract users from them or give them a more 'familiar experience' and its absolutely a detriment to the experience for people who use tumblr specifically because it isnt like other corporate social platforms. this is a separate gripe, but...

ive said before and will say again, twitter users should not look for an alternative to twitter, they should just stop fucking using it. thats like going from smoking a cigarette brand that uses slave labor to one that doesnt. youre a more ethical person but youre still giving yourself lung cancer.

[tecnestheim962]

I need more RG in my feed and less of literally everything else, the brain worms are seeking food and all they’re finding is stress and isolation

[blairdii]

dare i say, apart from the usual suspects who rot in their own echo chamber, the f1 community is more excited for the williams pairing than ferrari's

[notaplaceofhonour]

I expected to get some iffy results when searching “judaism” on tiktok (and definitely did; there’s a high number of tiktoks from non-jewish accounts, a lot of tiktoks about palestine, a “facts about judaism” video where the first “fact” is the claim “the jews are not allowed to have a jewish state in judaism”, one promoting neturei karta, and most of the videos actually by jewish creators are about conversion or comparing/contrasting judaism to islam & christianity)

but I was not expecting how many of the top videos are straight up just about islam—not just its relationship to judaism, not videos about islam by jewish creators—just videos by muslims about islam:

(these 4 videos were not at the very top, but i did not have to scroll far before all the videos just became about islam)

it’s just weird.

[copdog1234]

You know what else annoys me about people who hate Gale? The claim that they think he's pompous! He is quite literally the opposite. THIS MAN OFFERS TO SACRIFICE HIMSELF MULTIPLE TIMES UNTIL THE VERY END OF THE GAME EVEN WHEN HE HAS FOUND A REASON TO KEEP ON LIVING.

HIS OWN SELF-PROCLAIMED BIGGEST FLAW IS THAT HE BELIEVES THAT THE ENTIRE WORLD WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF HE WAS DEAD.

HOW IS THAT POMPOUS??? THE MAN HATES HIMSELF AND IS READY TO DIE AT THE DROP OF A HAT.

[jakeperalta]

rachel zegler is easily the most online celebrity I follow. like every day I see her pop up in the comments or likes on a random video which is generally just quite funny or sweet. but it is also sad that without fail any content even remotely referencing her will be inundated with deeply hateful comments. like imagine being 23 years old and trying to experience social media in the same way as everyone else your age except for the past two years there have been thousands of strangers jumping at every opportunity to share how much they hate you and want you silenced and/or disappeared from the face of the earth. I'm not exaggerating when I say I'd have a breakdown and never leave the house again

[canisalbus]

Which is your favorite platform? (of the ones you have accounts to post things I mean. I can't imagine it being Instagram since you don't really post there which honestly fair)

Tumblr, Twitter (X?) bluesky? Something else?

I think I'm going to have to go with tumblr, and it's not just because we're here. Twitter and Bluesky are nice and my experiences on both are overwhelmingly positive. But tumblr has an atmosphere that encourages originality, sharing your creations and talking about things in depth.

[snakesandferns]

I’m going to weigh in on this

It’s perfectly okay to perceive any ship involving tfa bumblebee as pedophilic, and to be disgusted by it.

However, it’s not okay to attack others based on this, or to throw very serious accusations around.

Due to the nature of the show, none of the characters of Transformers Animated have confirmed ages, so it’s impossible to make a canonical call like that. It’s valid to interpret and headcanon certain characters as children or as adults with neurodivergency. If you see Bumblebee as a child, and shipping him grosses you out, congratulations, you’re not a pedo.

But if others make it clear that they see him as an adult, and that’s why they ship him, you shouldn’t have a quarrel with that. They don’t ship him because they’re trying to push certain content. The only circumstance it should be a problem in is one where the shipper perceives and portrays him as a child.

In the end, the show is geared towards a younger audience, and as a result, characters will act immature and childish at times to appeal to that audience. It doesn’t need to be taken that seriously, unless you want it to, and if you do, you need to understand that your opinion isn’t the only one.

if you’ve made it all that way here, thank you for reading. Recently, my dash has been plagued by both sides of this argument, and I felt the need to weigh in.