#be contented to be of no reputation

[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

[cametotheshowinsd]

𝔯𝔢𝔭𝔲𝔱𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫: リボーン (reborn) | Taylor Swift

// reputation as a comic book

in the death of her reputation, she felt truly alive.

[lunalikestowriteanddraw]

You know on how Frost does his tabaxi hop at the beginning of episode 2? Do you think he did that little butt wiggle that cats do before they do a jump?

[taylor-is-gorgeous]

@taylor-is-gorgeous

[all-too-unwell-13]

what i think marauders characters would think about taylor swift

(part 2 - includes the emeralds/slytherin skittles + emmeline vance, emma vanity, & amelia bones)

the emeralds:

regulus - he'd love taylor swift!! regulus' favourite albums would be ttpd, midnights & red tv. i don't make the rules (yes i do) 🤷‍♀️ his favourite songs from each album would be 'loml,' 'question...?' and 'treacherous' (which he'd never admit, but it's true)

barty - i can see barty saying he hates taylor just to piss of reg, but if 'king of my heart' came on, he'd vibe and def wouldn't turn it off (he associates it with evan 👀) (wanna unpack why that is, barty?)

evan - loves her. period. his fav album is reputation and his favourite songs are 'gorgeous,' 'don't blame me' & 'delicate' !! (he associates them with barty 😙😙)

pandora - her number one song on spotify wrapped EVERY YEAR, without fail, is 'i hate it here' by taylor. second top song is 'never grow up (taylor's version)'. she's a speak now tv girl!!

dorcas - also pretends to hate taylor, but 'the man' by taylor is on almost all of her "favourite song" playlists so 😋😋 she's a lover girl at heart, but she tells pandora (she's the only one who knows she likes taylor) that her favourite is evermore

the others <3 (what is their group name?):

emmeline vance - genuinely doesn't listen to taylor swift much, but would never hate on her or say anything against her. she just doesn't know much of her music or much about her, so she doesn't judge 🤷‍♀️ will listen to fearless tv with mary if asked though!!

emma vanity - she's a huge swiftie and she's LOUD about it. everyone knows she loves taylor; her favourite album is lover & fav song is 'cruel summer' (emma liked it before it blew up, and she makes sure to add that whenever she tells someone)!! emma is alsooo a huge red tv girl, but more the lover girl side of red, yk?? like she LOVES 'begin again,' 'run,' as well as 'forever winter'

amelia bones - her and emma bond at first bc of their love for taylor and just music in general !! amelia doesn't seem like it, but she's an evermore and, strangely enough, debut type of person. her favourite all-time taylor song is 'a place in this world' !! a close second for her is 'dorothea'

[rmstitanics]

HISTORY-INSPIRED PINTEREST COLLAGES

Abraham Lincoln (Taylor’s Version)

[0sbrain]

some people need to SERIOUSLY reconsider how they engage with media.

if you don't try making the bare minimum level of engagement with whatever media you watch, you don't get to complain and be surprised when the people you trusted to do the analysis for you didn't bother to do it either.

[rotteneldritchhorror]

I know I keep saying Rafe is gay as fuck, and I stick by that— he is, but if he was into microlabels (he’d never— he’s too repressed and queerphobic for that) he’d definitely be like— Demi-bisensual or something, because as much as he doesn’t find women sexually or romantically attractive, he definitely can be sensually attracted to them

That man finds women aesthetically beautiful, he could look at pretty women all day, he thinks their voices (and… *cough*… sounds) are so cute and pretty, and after a lil while he loovveesss sensual affection with them— it’s why he kept Sofia (other than the fact that she was super nice and sweet and Barry liked her and she IMMEDIATELY caught onto the fact that she was a beard lol), she’s the perfect woman for a gay man lol (/j)

[gabriestat]

a few summers ago my father gifted my mother these red sunglasses and ever since they've been labelled in our house as the lolita glasses. "where are the lolita glasses?" "oh the lolita glasses are in the kitchen" what is better is that it was me who ended up using them the most

[deus-ex-mona]

tfw you nearly out yourself on main…

[ttomeposting]

more TOME screenshots w/ tumblr posts because i missed making them

[unhingedlesbear]

I suppose I should continue with that whole Du'Mark thing. I brought it up and now I must carry forward. Here are some Du'Mark looking screenshots. Boom, see what I'm on abt guys?

Come on guys.. he ties his hands TWICE and also takes his clothes

Like idk bro... seems kinda valid

(I'm so sorry guys this isn't like me.... kindheartedgummybears and Queerkearney are gonna be so disappointed in me if they see this)

[cocoabubbelle]

To the peeps still waiting on the SCOGUE-Tember and/or just SCOGUE content in general (so so so so sorry!!!)

[taylor-is-gorgeous]

@taylor-is-gorgeous

[agoddamn]

So I'm pretty sure Leonard McCoy hasn't reappeared much in modern Star Trek is that they genuinely don't know how to handle his and Spock's acrimonious relationship in the Current Racial Climate.

Or, well. They don't know how to handle it in an appropriately marketable way.

I can appreciate that TPTB are in an awkward position with him. I'd say they were deranged if they tried to transplant the original scripts 1:1. The original Star Trek was written in a fever dream of homage, creativity, and network meddling that you'd be hard-pressed to recreate today. It was also created for a completely different audience. Continuity was more of a suggestion and worldbuilding was largely sketched in by feelings over fact.

For example--there is the distinct feeling throughout TOS that Vulcans are superior to humans. How else could the identity of the Romulans be a secret, or basic Vulcan cultural practices? How else could T'Pau elbow into Starfleet command with one word? But that doesn't quite square up with the other actual facts--Starfleet is clearly not prepared for non-human crewmembers and doesn't support them. Spock's isolation speaks for itself. Later Trek canon establishing things like Section 31 only tightens the focus on humans.

Now, we know that out-of-universe factors like budget or the need for quick weekly drama (or deus ex machina) dictated this. They didn't have the budget for other alien regulars, they needed to produce an episodic series where you could drop right in and know who was what in five minutes, etc. We know all this. Undeniably, though, it helps shape a setting where McCoy sniping at Spock feels more sinister.

Personally (and I stress me, personally, and I fully expect other people to feel differently) when it comes to series that have had some kind of large cultural shift over time I like to favor original intent. With that one episode with the racism anger machine, the writers (awkwardly) made it clear that racism is something different from whatever the fuck McCoy and Spock have going on. That it was written by white guys in the 60s projecting a binary fairy tale version of racism is...not to be forgotten, let's say, but I don't think it entirely defeats the point here, either.

(Or rather, I don't think it entirely defeats the point in a way that's not consistent with the rest of Star Trek as a whole. If you like Star Trek at all you've probably come to some complex middle ground in your head where you enjoy it by reminding yourself, "it was 60/30/20 years ago, standards were different then.")

I'm on the record of thinking that this is a solvable dilemma; you just need a writer with a deft hand who understands the thorny waters they're navigating here. You could foreground that Spock and McCoy mutually talk the most deranged shit to one another (remember that Spock frequently accuses McCoy of killing crewmembers in their bitch sessions), re-center McCoy's trash talk to be more methods-focused than something that reads as racial hate, make it a plot point that neither of them talks to anyone else like this--it's a solvable problem.

But you know what's way easier, cheaper, and less risky? Mothballing the character, which is more or less what they have done since 2009.

And honestly, from what I've seen of modern Trek, I kinda don't trust them with the necessary delicacy here...

[p3nt4]

joe snake - inspired by "reputation" 🐍

are you ready for it? ♬

here's another sim inspired by a taylor's album c:

download and ccs links on my patreon

as always big thanks to the cc creators:

@woosteru (obsessed with your ccs!)

@squea

@nucrests

@newbeesims

@simisdica

@greenllamas

@adrienpastel-blog

@vyxated