5 ms·

The difference is that the cost of slop has decreased by orders of magnitude. What happens when only 1 in 10,000 of those tutorials you can find is any good, fr

by AstroBen 11mo ago

The difference is that the cost of slop has decreased by orders of magnitude. What happens when only 1 in 10,000 of those tutorials you can find is any good, from someone actually qualified to write it?

NewsaHackO 11mo ago
One instance of definite benefit of AI is AI summary web search. Searching for answers to simple questions and not having to cut though SEO slop is such an improvement
- bloomca 11mo ago
  The summary is often incorrect in at least some subtle details, which is invisible to a lot of people who do not understand LLM limitations. Now, we can argue that a typical SEO-optimized garbage article is not better, but I feel like the trust score for them was lower on average from a typical person.
  - immibis 11mo ago
    Marketing departments are already speaking of GEO - generative engine optimization. When a user asks an AI for the best X, you want it to say your X is the best, and you'll do whatever it takes to achieve that.
- AstroBen 11mo ago
  There was a time before SEO slop that web search was really valuable We're fighting slop with condensed slop
  - eloisant 11mo ago
    Before Google the web was already full of SEO slop. Except "SEO" just meant "put a list of popular keywords in a block hidden with CSS". That was the time of Altavista and other search engines. So the time you're talking about is a window when Google existed, but before they gave up on fighting spam.
- cml123 11mo ago
  I don't think searching for answers to simple questions was a problem until Google nerfed their own search engine.
  - NewsaHackO 11mo ago
    Pretty sure Google attempting to curb SEO tactics is what led to whatever nerfing you are talking about.
    - cml123 11mo ago
      granted it's not up to courtroom standards, this post linked by another commenter in the chain does paint the picture pretty well of an internal struggle between Search and Ads inside Google as a company, where there was a decision to promote user-negative changes to Search as a way to increase the total number of searches performed, thereby increasing the number of ads that can be shown. This happened during 2019. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
  - whatevertrevor 11mo ago
    I don't understand this position, do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse? Before I'm misunderstood I do want to clarify that IMO, the end user experience for web searching on Google is much worse in 2025 than it was in say 2000. But, the web was also much much smaller, less commercial and the SNR was much better in general. Sure, web search companies moved away from direct keyword matching to much more complex "semantics-adjacent" matching algorithms. But we don't have the counterfactual keyword-based Google search algorithm from 2000 on data from 2025 to claim that it's just search getting worse, or the problem simply getting much harder over time and Google failing to keep up with it. In light of that, I'm much more inclined to believe that it's SEO spam becoming an industry that killed web search instead of companies "nerfing their own search engines".
- inferiorhuman 11mo ago
  Hard disagree. AI summaries are useless for the same reason AI summaries from Google and DDG are useless: it's almost always missing the context. The AI page summaries typically take the form of "here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" instead of "here's what the page actually says". Just give me the fucking contents. If I wanted AI slop I'd ask my fucking doorknob.
  - NewsaHackO 11mo ago
    I think you have some of your wires crossed, asking Google for "here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" is not what most people think is a simple question (also asking Google to reprint copyrighted material us also a non starter). Asking Google "what is the flag for persevering Metadata using scp" and getting the flag name instead of a SEO article with the a misleading title go on about so third party program that you can download that does exactly that and never actually tell you the answer is ridiculous and I am happy AI has help reduce the click bait
    - inferiorhuman 11mo ago
      "here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" is not what most people think is a simple question It's also not the question I asked. I'm literally trying to parse out what question was asked. That's what makes AI slop so infuriating: it's entirely orthogonal to the information I'm after. Asking Google "what is the flag for persevering Metadata using scp" and getting the flag name instead of a SEO article with the a misleading title go on about so third party program that you can download that does exactly that and never actually tell you the answer is ridiculous and I am happy AI has help reduce the click bait Except that the AI slop Google and Microsoft and DDG use for summaries masks whether or not a result is SEO nonsense. Instead of using excerpts of the page the AI summary simply suggests that the SEO garbage is answering the question you asked. These bullshit AI summaries make it infinitely harder to parse out what's actually useful. I suppose that's the goal though. Hide that most of the results are low quality and force you to click through to more pages (ad views) to find something relevant. AI slop changes the summaries from "garbage in, garbage out" to simply "garbage out".
weitendorf 11mo ago
What happens when the monkeys stop getting bananas to work on the typewriters? More stories?
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  Sadly these aren't monkeys. These are more like termites eating at any and all wood they can find. They'll eat at the foundation and move to the next trend to eat at. Spam by its nature is low effort, low yields anyway. They don't particularly care about making scraps since their pipeline is nearly automated.

NewsaHackO 11mo ago

One instance of definite benefit of AI is AI summary web search. Searching for answers to simple questions and not having to cut though SEO slop is such an improvement

bloomca 11mo ago
The summary is often incorrect in at least some subtle details, which is invisible to a lot of people who do not understand LLM limitations. Now, we can argue that a typical SEO-optimized garbage article is not better, but I feel like the trust score for them was lower on average from a typical person.
- immibis 11mo ago
  Marketing departments are already speaking of GEO - generative engine optimization. When a user asks an AI for the best X, you want it to say your X is the best, and you'll do whatever it takes to achieve that.
AstroBen 11mo ago
There was a time before SEO slop that web search was really valuable We're fighting slop with condensed slop
- eloisant 11mo ago
  Before Google the web was already full of SEO slop. Except "SEO" just meant "put a list of popular keywords in a block hidden with CSS". That was the time of Altavista and other search engines. So the time you're talking about is a window when Google existed, but before they gave up on fighting spam.
cml123 11mo ago
I don't think searching for answers to simple questions was a problem until Google nerfed their own search engine.
- NewsaHackO 11mo ago
  Pretty sure Google attempting to curb SEO tactics is what led to whatever nerfing you are talking about.
  - cml123 11mo ago
    granted it's not up to courtroom standards, this post linked by another commenter in the chain does paint the picture pretty well of an internal struggle between Search and Ads inside Google as a company, where there was a decision to promote user-negative changes to Search as a way to increase the total number of searches performed, thereby increasing the number of ads that can be shown. This happened during 2019. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- whatevertrevor 11mo ago
  I don't understand this position, do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse? Before I'm misunderstood I do want to clarify that IMO, the end user experience for web searching on Google is much worse in 2025 than it was in say 2000. But, the web was also much much smaller, less commercial and the SNR was much better in general. Sure, web search companies moved away from direct keyword matching to much more complex "semantics-adjacent" matching algorithms. But we don't have the counterfactual keyword-based Google search algorithm from 2000 on data from 2025 to claim that it's just search getting worse, or the problem simply getting much harder over time and Google failing to keep up with it. In light of that, I'm much more inclined to believe that it's SEO spam becoming an industry that killed web search instead of companies "nerfing their own search engines".
inferiorhuman 11mo ago
Hard disagree. AI summaries are useless for the same reason AI summaries from Google and DDG are useless: it's almost always missing the context. The AI page summaries typically take the form of "here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" instead of "here's what the page actually says". Just give me the fucking contents. If I wanted AI slop I'd ask my fucking doorknob.
- NewsaHackO 11mo ago
  I think you have some of your wires crossed, asking Google for "here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" is not what most people think is a simple question (also asking Google to reprint copyrighted material us also a non starter). Asking Google "what is the flag for persevering Metadata using scp" and getting the flag name instead of a SEO article with the a misleading title go on about so third party program that you can download that does exactly that and never actually tell you the answer is ridiculous and I am happy AI has help reduce the click bait
  - inferiorhuman 11mo ago
    "here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" is not what most people think is a simple question It's also not the question I asked. I'm literally trying to parse out what question was asked. That's what makes AI slop so infuriating: it's entirely orthogonal to the information I'm after. Asking Google "what is the flag for persevering Metadata using scp" and getting the flag name instead of a SEO article with the a misleading title go on about so third party program that you can download that does exactly that and never actually tell you the answer is ridiculous and I am happy AI has help reduce the click bait Except that the AI slop Google and Microsoft and DDG use for summaries masks whether or not a result is SEO nonsense. Instead of using excerpts of the page the AI summary simply suggests that the SEO garbage is answering the question you asked. These bullshit AI summaries make it infinitely harder to parse out what's actually useful. I suppose that's the goal though. Hide that most of the results are low quality and force you to click through to more pages (ad views) to find something relevant. AI slop changes the summaries from "garbage in, garbage out" to simply "garbage out".

weitendorf 11mo ago

What happens when the monkeys stop getting bananas to work on the typewriters? More stories?

johnnyanmac 11mo ago
Sadly these aren't monkeys. These are more like termites eating at any and all wood they can find. They'll eat at the foundation and move to the next trend to eat at. Spam by its nature is low effort, low yields anyway. They don't particularly care about making scraps since their pipeline is nearly automated.