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PaperclipPerfector  19hr ago (text post)   722 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 20, 2026

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I work on the research-side of AI and infodumps like this are super helpful for me to get a handle on how people actually use AI. Thank you.

But I want to push back on this comment:

Users on themotte accused me of generating slop here- no, that’s bad SEO. Good SEO is concise and has a few highly relevant keywords. Bad SEO is a bunch of irrelevant slop. Regardless, these are short sentences that I guarantee hardly any human reads - it is mostly read by bots at this point.

The fact that humans don't read this SEO is what makes it slop. You (and others like you) are what have made writing these "machine only SEO articles" necessary, and why google is increasingly shitty. It was slop before AI and is still slop today (just more efficiently produced slop). You have poisoned the internet commons with this slop and made the internet a measurably less useful place for me.

For this, I hate you and the millions of people like you who have ruined the internet. I understand that you are working within the constraints of "the algorithm", and each of your individual actions has not meaningfully impacted my life negatively, and that I have probably even benefited from some of the actions of people like you (I haven't bought clothing in >10 years, so I doubt I've benefited from you personally). But nevertheless I believe the overall effect you all (as a group) are having on society is net-negative. And for this I hate you. As I type this I realize that this hatred is probably bad for my soul, and so I also feel a need to ask your forgiveness for this hatred.

uhhhhh ok. If it were up to me google would just ignore all marketing copy and google would still work. But google made the choice to take the marketing copy that I used to use zero+1 thought to produce, and now use zero+0 thought to produce, and ruin their product with it. I also don't like that google doesn't work but I don't see that as my fault. The algorithm just needs keywords and phrases to show the people the relevant product. I just make little titles and brands and one or two sentence descriptions to help people find them. I'm not intentionally misleading anyone to find my product in an irrelevant way- that would be bad SEO because it would show up for irrelevant things, people wouldn't click them and they'd get de-ranked.

You asked for my forgiveness but I don't think you have a valid complaint against me or what I do so I won't grant it unless you can prove that I have poor intentions or that it's not google's fault for scraping things in a weird and counterproductive way but that it's actually my fault personally...

The fact that it's called "marketing copy", not "informative writing" or "product description" betrays the intent. It's optimizing a signal so that the algorithm promotes your product over someone else's product. You might not be intentionally misleading anyone, but you're in the business of generating text, not communicating. If it's not primarily meant to be read by a human, it's internet pollution.

I am genuinely oblivious as to how I could possibly more ethically attach any string of letters to anything I produce that wouldn't fit the definition of internet pollution then. I genuinely just make titles and descriptions as short as possible with as many high relevance keywords (which is often like 2 to 4 and no more!) to direct real human people to my listings. How can I do it more ethically than that? I say that only robots probably read this because it's true, everyone in ecommerce knows that customers mostly only look at the picture. If I upload just the picture of my item then no one will find what I'm selling and the robots won't know the product details.

maybe a little harsh for mere product descriptions (but even those get optimized to the point of absurdity). I've just seen too many "content farms" generating fake blog posts gushing about some crap or other

everyone in e-commerce knows that customers mostly only look at the picture

Do you have a source for this? I find it hard to believe.

In a different comment you mention that you go to the trouble of seeking out "good-quality" sources. It seems obvious to me that customers can discern the "quality" of an item only from reading the description.

Sure, this is why Etsy, eBay and depop all collapse the product descriptions when you shop with them. Aliexpress too. Amazon only shows you the first few lines a lot of the time and then you have to click expand. I imagine only a small fraction of buyers take the time to read every item description fully before they purchase. Haven’t you seen listings that say “read desc” or “read description” in the title heading? That’s because everyone who’s ever spent time selling online gets extraneous returns citing a problem that was clearly stated in the item description.

It seems obvious to me that customers can discern the "quality" of an item only from reading the description.

Uhhhh a picture is worth a thousand words, a customer can be deceived into discerning the quality or lack thereof from an accurate or inaccurate description. Have you ever sold something online before? Or bought something? I personally at least skim item descriptions whenever I’m buying something but it’s still a crapshoot much of the time whether their images and descriptions even match the item I receive in the end. I think I am better at this than the majority of people in e-commerce but there’s still room for error and miscommunication and misperception of what is being bought or sold as there is always some margin for misunderstanding as there will be as language and images are fundamentally imprecise and experiences and expectations vary between people.

I despair when I see the utter shamelessness of SEO people asking for help doing this in technical spaces. It's as if they don't even realize there's anything wrong with it. Like the owner of a factory cheerfully asking about the most efficient way to redirect toxic waste into the river.

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