5 ms·

How concerned should we be that this only works because currently SEO has no incentive to target Reddit or StackOverflow, and if this takes off, those communiti

by Imnimo 5y ago

How concerned should we be that this only works because currently SEO has no incentive to target Reddit or StackOverflow, and if this takes off, those communities will be overrun by SEO spam?

rel2thr 5y ago
how would that work? the point of the SEO spam is to fill up a site with 'content' and then sell ads or affiliate links to make money on that site You can't really make money by commenting on Reddit, they are very agressive about affiliate links and banning
- Imnimo 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm not sure it would work the same as current SEO spam, but I just feel like some portion of this idea is predicated on mis-aligning incentives. Right now, SEO has no incentive to go after Reddit comments, so Reddit comments are (apparently) higher quality than raw search results. But once search engines start directing people to Reddit comments, the SEO's incentives shift, and it feels like their behavior would change accordingly (although I admit I can't articulate a clear vision of what that new behavior would be), causing the reliability of Reddit comments to plummet. Maybe it's true that Reddit's moderation is sufficient to prevent this from happening, but I feel like I see a decent amount of SEO-adjacent subreddits already, for things like new crypto pump-and-dumps. Before Reddit removed nsfw subs from r/all, you'd sometimes see a bunch of spam links for OnlyFans sites. I could imagine a situation where Brave has to try to distinguish good subreddits from bad subreddits and it becomes just as challenging as distinguishing good websites from bad websites.
  - kovek 5y ago
    It looks like these days, NLP models are able to “seem” human. Start generating many reddit accounts, act like humans, gain karma. When an important discussion appears, use the army of bots to debate that product A is better than product B EDIT: If previously the race was to make a business look legitimate (page rank), then now it is about making users look legitimate (human rank)
- marcthe12 5y ago
  Shilling and shameless plugs.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Nowado 5y ago
It is exactly that. I'm not sure what the norms are on linking vs copying own posts here, so for now I'm going with both. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30369746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30369746 21 points by Nowado 62 days ago | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Reddit can't build a better search engine Marketer perspective: you can not build a communication tool you find useful that won't end up being used to make money. It will get figured out. I could go into a bit more philosophical angle with reterritorialization done by capital, but I think it's much simpler to consider the following: between politics (where once any division in population is found, it becomes valuable instantly), classical business marketing (where once anyone makes purchasing decision informed by something, it becomes valuable), capital markets (where once anything can be used to predict anything about any company or asset class, it becomes valuable) and more personal scams (where once you figure out someone's niche interest, it becomes valuable) there just isn't anything left. Go ahead, try to find something. Reddit is being constantly targeted. I still use it, because what else?, but if the method isn't obvious, here's what you do: you are hired by/own small company making niche potato chips dip sold via Amazon. You go to google keywords and check 'potato chips dip', you google all you can find there and some of your ideas, you write down all top10 results and check every now and then (well, your SEO monitoring app does it for you). Whatever you find that allows for user input, you generate that input - accounts are cheap - and maybe do some external SEO (thus beating 99,9% of social media results online). That's it, it's easy. What Reddit (and any mildly aware SM company) does, is they try to offer marketers access to audience for a price that's lower than cost of what I just described. There will be edge cases, especially on international markets where value of time for various business owners differs vastly, which will lead to sites slowly getting more clogged up with ads, but that's the general gist. If you can imagine using similar method to get in front of your eyes when you're looking for something, then it would just be quite weird if nobody ever did it.
jrochkind1 5y ago
Kind of sideways related to "Goodhart's law" -- "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Which kind of dooms all web search now that one thinks about it.
mr_toad 5y ago
The types of questions (software recommendations etc) that spammers would answer tend to be off topic in StackOverflow. And off-topic answers tend to get flagged and down voted very quickly.

by Imnimo 5y ago

How concerned should we be that this only works because currently SEO has no incentive to target Reddit or StackOverflow, and if this takes off, those communities will be overrun by SEO spam?

rel2thr 5y ago

how would that work? the point of the SEO spam is to fill up a site with 'content' and then sell ads or affiliate links to make money on that site You can't really make money by commenting on Reddit, they are very agressive about affiliate links and banning

Imnimo 5y ago
Yeah, I'm not sure it would work the same as current SEO spam, but I just feel like some portion of this idea is predicated on mis-aligning incentives. Right now, SEO has no incentive to go after Reddit comments, so Reddit comments are (apparently) higher quality than raw search results. But once search engines start directing people to Reddit comments, the SEO's incentives shift, and it feels like their behavior would change accordingly (although I admit I can't articulate a clear vision of what that new behavior would be), causing the reliability of Reddit comments to plummet. Maybe it's true that Reddit's moderation is sufficient to prevent this from happening, but I feel like I see a decent amount of SEO-adjacent subreddits already, for things like new crypto pump-and-dumps. Before Reddit removed nsfw subs from r/all, you'd sometimes see a bunch of spam links for OnlyFans sites. I could imagine a situation where Brave has to try to distinguish good subreddits from bad subreddits and it becomes just as challenging as distinguishing good websites from bad websites.
- kovek 5y ago
  It looks like these days, NLP models are able to “seem” human. Start generating many reddit accounts, act like humans, gain karma. When an important discussion appears, use the army of bots to debate that product A is better than product B EDIT: If previously the race was to make a business look legitimate (page rank), then now it is about making users look legitimate (human rank)
marcthe12 5y ago
Shilling and shameless plugs.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Nowado 5y ago

It is exactly that. I'm not sure what the norms are on linking vs copying own posts here, so for now I'm going with both. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30369746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30369746 21 points by Nowado 62 days ago | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Reddit can't build a better search engine Marketer perspective: you can not build a communication tool you find useful that won't end up being used to make money. It will get figured out. I could go into a bit more philosophical angle with reterritorialization done by capital, but I think it's much simpler to consider the following: between politics (where once any division in population is found, it becomes valuable instantly), classical business marketing (where once anyone makes purchasing decision informed by something, it becomes valuable), capital markets (where once anything can be used to predict anything about any company or asset class, it becomes valuable) and more personal scams (where once you figure out someone's niche interest, it becomes valuable) there just isn't anything left. Go ahead, try to find something. Reddit is being constantly targeted. I still use it, because what else?, but if the method isn't obvious, here's what you do: you are hired by/own small company making niche potato chips dip sold via Amazon. You go to google keywords and check 'potato chips dip', you google all you can find there and some of your ideas, you write down all top10 results and check every now and then (well, your SEO monitoring app does it for you). Whatever you find that allows for user input, you generate that input - accounts are cheap - and maybe do some external SEO (thus beating 99,9% of social media results online). That's it, it's easy. What Reddit (and any mildly aware SM company) does, is they try to offer marketers access to audience for a price that's lower than cost of what I just described. There will be edge cases, especially on international markets where value of time for various business owners differs vastly, which will lead to sites slowly getting more clogged up with ads, but that's the general gist. If you can imagine using similar method to get in front of your eyes when you're looking for something, then it would just be quite weird if nobody ever did it.

jrochkind1 5y ago

Kind of sideways related to "Goodhart's law" -- "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Which kind of dooms all web search now that one thinks about it.

mr_toad 5y ago

The types of questions (software recommendations etc) that spammers would answer tend to be off topic in StackOverflow. And off-topic answers tend to get flagged and down voted very quickly.