I write SEO drivel for a living. I'm fairly good at it, even if the products I shill for are useless to 90% of the population... and that's the problem. There was a time when I was able to not think too much about it, even if I was a little uncomfortable with the fact that my "job" basically shouldn't exist and contributes to the eshittification of the internet. I was just happy to finally be able to learn a living after being unemployed for so long.

But I can't ignore it anymore. The articles get harder and harder to write, the research is boring and pointless, and search engines aren't exactly helpful either on account of said eshittification, which I'm contributing to. And that's on top of all the extra requirements the clients have.

But the thing that makes it the hardest to keep going is that I can't in good conscience market things to people, however indirectly, unless I am absolutely sure the product will help them or I can personally vouch for the usefulness of the product. Which I obviously can't because I've never tried any of the products I'm writing to shill for. And I think it's deceptive, which doesn't sit right with me.

CW: mental health stuff, Calvinist brainworms

I used to be able to kinda just dissociate and not think about it too much. Just focus on the money, you know? As long as I could earn my own way and not have to rely on others just to get by, be less of a burden to others. Also feel like a proper adult for once. Yeah, I know everyone else is winging it, but when you've never been independent, it's hard not to feel like there's something wrong with you (even though that in itself is a capitalist brainworm and all that).

I also hate that I'm contributing to the selling of more useless shit that nobody actually needs. Like, we're wasting tons of water to power some AI bazinga are convinced is the next coming of Jesus? disgost

I think I'm going to quit this line of work. I just can't do it anymore. Apparently, some people can make a butt load of money writing this drivel but I personally have never made all that much. And honestly, I don't even think the money would help at this point. But with my lack of skills and social anxiety, I'm not really sure what other jobs I can do.

  • Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]
    ·
    3 months ago

    I used to work as a web developer for a retail chain that specialized in African blood diamonds and gaudy shit that was destined for the Cash 4 Gold heap pretty much the second it left the factory. My predecessor had set up one o' them fancy, new-fangled interwebs "e"-"commerce" webzones and immediately quit the company upon realizing that he was in over his head and couldn't do administration duties on a LAMP server and fix all of the weird site content issues that he'd introduced by hacking a shitty third-party Magento theme to pieces.

    Cut to about six months later when I came on board and was going through trying to review some of the site's performance and search relevance issues. Somewhere along the line, I found that one of the many, many extensions that Dipshit had installed included a dynamic product catalog filter set that was not only the #1 cause of our ongoing site performance issues by that point, but also returned canonical links in the sitemap generator, and Google had been crawling all of these dynamically-generated result sets based on every single product attribute in the system.

    The punch line: many of these attributes returned empty result sets, and the default landing page for an empty result set had a big fucking <h1>WOOPS!</h1> at the top of the page. For several years, if you searched "WOOPS" on Google, that company's e-commerce site was #1.

    TL;DR: Semantic SEO is 10,000% bullshit.

    Edit: I also want to include that Dipshit had "VOTE RON PAUL" bullshit all over his LinkedIn profile. During Obama's second term.