On Reddit you have a very good chance of seeing multiple high quality, well-informed posts on whatever topic you're interested in, written by real people who genuinely want to offer help in an area they're knowledgeable about.
On Google these days, even once you scroll past the wall of actual ads, you'll usually just see a bunch more defacto ads masquerading as "organic" results.
The pervasiveness of fake, shill, and/or paid reviews across the rest of the web makes it difficult for me to escape the suspicion that there is pervasive review fraud on Reddit as well.
I see this sentiment a lot. Are there any actual examples of this happening, or does it merely propagate on the basis of sounding true?
It's "manipulate the results", by way of "be careful what you wish for" - if there's money to be made in pandering to a search engines whims, then that will happen at scale and that content will swamp the good stuff that you wanted in the first place.
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
So, when you try to measure content quality in some way, that becomes a target, and starts to distort the quality of the content.
I think this applies equally in any niche, at any scale where people find it worthwhile.
If you have a niche search engine that has different content requirements, and it becomes worthwhile to SEO niche content for that engine, then it will happen, eventually.
I think it just has to become worthwhile (and then for this fact to become known) - but that threshold is going to vary a lot, in different niches, times, places, etc...
There are plenty of people (~everyone?) gaming/SEO'ing the search on Amazon, Etsy, Ebay, etc... for example, by doing niche & platform specific SEO on their listings on those platforms.
I also think that people's definition of "worthwhile" differs too. For the broad SEO industry, it monetary. For people making posts on HN or Reddit, it's Karma, or Discussion or something - and people will optimize their content towards that, just for "fun".
Actually, I think this applies pretty boardly to making _anything_, more or less, once you have someone or something evaluating/measuring your output?
How _harmful_ this is, depends on what's being optimized for; scale & rewards probably change how "hard" the optimization arms race gets - as well as how many people are affected.
And that was when Google was over 12 years old.
There was a time I only saw listicles on Cracked.com. Now most of Page 1 content on Google is structured like that, and most are low quality blogspam.