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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

I disagree.

For example, SO copycats are legitimate in that they respect the license and otherwise just serve the content to whoever sends them an HTTP request. As far as I know they don't spam links to their domain anywhere. They are low-quality and of dubious utility for sure, but I'd rather not make the Internet a place where you need to prove quality & utility to someone to be able to host an HTTP server.

The real problem is that a dumbass like Google comes along, sees this and decides that it should rank higher than the source content.

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Exactly. Similarly, I think any dumbass should be able to fix cars in his own yard, including for a fee and calling himself a business.

But Google maps better not drive me to someone's yard when I ask to navigate to a nearby mechanic.

If it did, it would be hard to blame anyone but Google.

If they're not spamming their links, how do they get such high search engine optimization?

Somebody upthread suggested it was just the use of Google ads, which I suppose is possible, but somehow it seems unlikely. Google sure does love money but they also need to be considered a good search engine, and I'd expect them to be at least a little wary about things like that.

Is there something else I'm missing?

It's my understanding that link spamming has become counter-productive since a Google algorithm update almost a decade ago? I'm not sure what they're doing but I don't think it's link spam, because of that and also because I've never seen their spam anywhere (if they're using link spam they must do so on sources that have good "authority" for programming-related topics and thus one of us would've likely seen it).

It’s often cheap blog spam “original content“ and matching cheap social media spam to increase how legitimate the blog looks … which is cheaper than ever now thanks to advances in machine learning models like GPT-3 and other current generation models. The pipeline is take a random sample of pages in the domain, take the target page -> summarise -> generate some blog spam of varying length and level of human input -> if desired based on social media analytics then generate some automated social posts about the blog article that was just added since it’s widely done by real humans with their real blogs it all looks legit.

This is how it gets done and Google used to be brutal about crushing it, somewhere along the way they seem to have given up on being so brutal.

>SO copycats are legitimate in that they respect the license

Do they? SO contributions are under CC BY-SA. Haven't seen copycats providing attribution let alone specifying that the content is under the same license.

I'm not sure, but the business model of them is ad revenue - they get paid as soon as the page loads. Adding the require attribution & license disclosure wouldn't hurt them at all, so I'm assuming they're either already doing it or will start doing it if asked.

Is it common that SO and Wikipedia copycats respects open licenses? Most times I run into them they do not.

It's really tricky to enforce open licenses on this scale as it's each contributor that licenses their content rather than the platform host.

See my response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32204913

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