3 ms·
A lot of the high quality content that exists on the internet only exists because the advertising pays for the people who create it. Be careful what you wish f
by peter422 4y ago
A lot of the high quality content that exists on the internet only exists because the advertising pays for the people who create it.
Be careful what you wish for. If you make sites with ads rank lower the void will just be filled with crypto scams or affiliate marketing. Remember it's a lot easier to make a spam site than a high quality one, changes that disincentive high quality sites from existing won't necessarily do the same for spam sites.
- Retric 4y agoQuantity of tracking and advertising is a great proxy for spam content. If a page contains 10+ affiliate links, I don’t want to see it. If it contains just one it might be more legitimate content like an author talking about their book and link which gives them a commission on it.
- dazc 4y agoLook forward to multiple sites with just one link on each page then. Any kind of well-intentioned rule you set can be figured out and gamed.
- Gareth321 4y agoI've been using crowd-sourced tools like SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike, and I really like them. So far they've resisted attack using some kind of consensus algorithm. I've also been using the search engine Kagi, which lets me downrank and even eliminate certain domains and sites which I believe to be low quality. I wonder if it's possible to marry these. If the majority of users dislike a domain, it gets downranked. Of course bot detection and perhaps the use of logins might be required, but compromises must be made if the desire is a better search engine.
- Retric 4y agoSuch shifts are’t free. If spam is less profitable, you get less spam.
- chongli 4y agoI follow a lot of YouTube creators who product genuinely excellent and valuable content. They typically limit their sponsorships to one short segment per long video. At the same time, their video descriptions often contain numerous affiliate links, preceded by a disclosure that the following links are to be used if you’re interested in purchasing one of the products and you want to support the creator. Those links honestly do not bother me at all. I barely even notice them since video descriptions are hidden on YouTube, apart from a few sentences at the top. So how do we make search engines that distinguish legitimate creators like that from spammers who create fake blogs with fake reviews and tons of affiliate links, all using a fancy blog template that makes the site seem trustworthy?
- Nextgrid 4y agoYouTube descriptions started being useless since they became a copy/pasted generic blurb of text (irrelevant to the video at hand) and a dumping ground for various social media or similar links, so no surprise that you aren't bothered by spam links in something that nobody looks at anymore because it's already been spammed to hell. But there was a time when descriptions were all manually written and were an actual summary/overview of what's in the video. > So how do we make search engines that distinguish legitimate creators like that from spammers who create fake blogs with fake reviews and tons of affiliate links, all using a fancy blog template that makes the site seem trustworthy? It's a whole other problem for videos so I'm going to approach this from a website search results point of view: we simply use presence of commercial content as a ranking factor - if the commercial content is all that matches your query then you get it, but if something non-commercial matches your query equally well then it comes first. This encourages non-commercial content without banning commercial content entirely. Ads/marketing/etc are noise, so it would be normal for a search engine designed to serve the user to rank low-noise content above noisy content, right?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- solarkraft 4y agoI don't know what content you consume, but most commercial content I find is garbage, while non-commercial content shines because it's produced by someone who actually cares.