Search engines are basically 90% blogspam promotion machines at this point, and the blogspam churning engine is going to become completely autonomous. The tools we're relied on for nearly three decades now are going to become a big virtual tug of war between machine-learning-guided SEO systems and machine-learning-guided ad revenue systems.

Every single anonymous interaction is going to be suspect. The next dogwhistling fucking cryptonazi groyper you run into is probably not even going to be a human being. Machine learning is probably going to elect the next US president. Eventually the medium will become so polluted that we will have to go back to doing everything in person.

Thank you for reading my doompost

    • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I've noticed a lot of my google auto suggest fill ins come with "on reddit" when I ask a question. I think people are starting to catch on to google being a giant ad machine.

      • SerLava [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I do this all the time. Especially when the results are shitty blog articles that don't answer my complex question but instead rattle off the basic facts about the topic or try to sell me shit. Certain keywords just set the algorithm off and you can't get it to stop rattling off dumb shit. Like anything containing "low blood pressure" - fuck you, high blood pressure - here is how to fix high blood pressure. High. High.

        The cure is adding site:reddit.com to the search. There's lies, there's astroturfing, and there's sometimes spam, but there are also tons of nerds trying to catch people doing this, upvoting good responses, and even upvoting counter-arguments to any bad comments that got upvoted. It's a way, way better than the recycled blogs.

      • fox [comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Yeah, but reddit is known to be where people go to ask questions so companies astroturf subreddits where their products are mentioned.