I'm at the point that I save a copy of any sufficiently cool image I see online (for art inspo or even if it's just something that makes me happy) since I've lost pictures into the churning froth of twitter by itself after making the mistake of looking away for an hour.

I feel really sad when I can't find a meme or gif a friend reminds me of because it's impossible to find even when you remember the title exactly

people thought this? maybe people who didn't understand how the internet is hosted. by 2004 i had seen several favorite websites shut down.

Nah, AI is probably the greatest thing that could've happened to our ever increasing enshittification of the corporate web. All it's doing currently is just destroying algorithms that never served genuine content anyway, as neither the algorithms, nor AI, can be used for anything relevant. Google really dug their own hole on this.

I saw the writings on the wall and quit the SEO business two years back because of exactly this reason.

To be beholden on the whims of google is not a foundation to build a business around. If your entire "business" is based on collecting breadcrumbs handed to you from google compared to what they generate on what you do, your business isn't a business, it's an employment, to google, without a contract. Where they have every right to fire you at any moment when they see fit.

You're thinking of the generation after

Idk, man. There was a brief period from, maybe 2002 to 2015, when Google search results were somewhat relevant. This was after the late-80s/early-90s, when web crawlers were a crap shoot at best. And the Alta-Vista / Lycos / AOL / Yahoo era where you could get high profile results reliably but everything else was 50% porn-categories on any conceivable topic.

Even at its peak, Google wasn't terribly useful outside of the first 10-20 returns. Bing was a flop, until they poached and functionally rebranded as DuckDuckGo. One of the primary appeals of sites like Reddit stemmed from the community oriented information exchange - you could go to a boutique sub on a particular topic and discover sites and content producers you'd never heard of before. Then those sites would gain prominence and start showing up in search engine queries over time. Wikipedia was, similarly, useful in large part because the information was consistent and reliable from month to month and year to year. One of the better things Wikipedia did was to lock down their bigger topics and limit who could post, if for no other reason than it curbed the "newer is better" impulse of modern web traffic engines.

But gaming search engine queries has always been a thing. Bush's guys figuring out how to get John Kerry's website to show up when you searched for "Waffles" was a thing back in 2004. Or Steve Lener rigging his Albino Blacksheep site to make "French Military Victories" redirect to a message asking if the user was looking for "French Military Defeats". Google-bombing has been around since the firm's inception. Nothing about the above is particularly new or disturbing, save in so far as its a problem these hubs of genius still can't solve.

Generating 1800 articles in a few hours seems like vastly less work than doing the same thing "manually" though.

Yeah this is literally just an ad for the AI article-writing service this guy runs - and honestly I could imagine a lot of marketing shops are trying to run the same thing with just OpenAI API calls already, it looks like his prompt is just "Write an article based on this URL", which is pretty garbage considering there's more sophisticated ways at milling out bullshit like this.

What's the purpose of all this though?

Sitemap is like all the links and names of links on a website. They then filled all those links with ai genned garbage. At least i think thats what it is

New levels of search enshittification poisoning results. Advertising arms race online just went from nuclear to hydrogen bombs.

Hey I'm looking for apples. They seems to be kind of scarce right now and I need to find who has the remaining ones a heck I'm wiling to pay a premium just to have one.

Orange developers / online marketers target your apple searches and spam the results with links to oranges and false leads of apples.

Google, Bing, other search engines that piggyback off them are now poisoned to death with spam and you aren't able to find the options to buy apples.

people used to spam articles, maybe with slight variation in phrasing/words, to create a ton of content easily. it's called "article spinning."

search engines learned to recognize this and punish websites that did it. it would hide/lower them on the search.

this person took all the website links from his competitors, spammed fake internet articles with those links, and now the search engines are punishing the competitor by hiding the competitor's links/website.

the "new" is that it used to be programs or wordbots things that did this shady practice, apparently AI is just spitting the shit out now and is way easier to do.

🎵So many possible worlds, but we’ve got this one🎶