Seo is a fair play and I don't see why we are so quick to blame young people. It is Google that should be blamed for making themselves more important than they deserve to be.
In a perfect world, there should be. But sadly we don't live in that world.
> The fact that you can't tell the difference speaks volumes for your moral character.
I seem to have hit a nerve there. Sorry if I ruined your day or something..
Say somewhere in the bowels of their ML pipelines, features that get scored include things like "has a favicon.ico and it's unique and not seen elsewhere". Well, then doing that isn't really fraud to me. It's just adding "proxies for quality" so you aren't dinged for not having them.
It is not okay to glide over the 'young people' part and generally not being empathetic to those trying to beat the market. If it is fraud, which is a crime, are you suggesting these people should be sent to jail? Because if not then you shouldn't use the that word. Words have meaning.
Jail is too much, but it woukd be nice to have a fine of some sort, because "poisining the well" for everyone is really not cool.
(in practice any such system would be abused a lot, so we are probably better off with status quo.. but in the ideal world we'd punish those people)
Promoting publicly editable database as authoritative is high bar we must achieve at the cost of just banning juvenile behavior.
I am not sure why you keep bringing up Google here -- no one cares about it, it is megacorp and it can take care of itself. We want to protect entities like IMDB and Wikipedia. It does not matter why it was vandalized (and that's what happened here) -- to fool Google, or to impress friends, or to get to backstage -- it was bad, and it should not be encouraged.
And finally, learning that actions have responsibilities is an important part of the growing up. I certainly got some parking tickets when I was younger and it taught me an important lesson. (Of course the punishment should not be excessive, nothing that stays on your record for the whole life).
You defending thia is really just telling more about you. Amazon sits on a domain called "international" movie database where they don't have anyone to verify the biggest block-busters of the biggest movie makers in the world. With your logic you should be out on the streets demanding criminal proceedings against this "fraud".
Nothing else for me to say. Vote me down all you want.
Poisoning the well is a deeply antisocial act, and just because it isn't the literal town water well, but is instead the common information well, doesn't make it less of an 'eff-you-all' act.