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Comment by chocolatkey | Hacker News Reader

I apologize for the somewhat off-topic nature off this comment, but it really irritates me when I see the website for a product with competition, go to their sitemap, and see this blatant SEO gaming. For example, I went to their FAQ (https://www.dragonflydb.io/faq) expecting things about their database, instead I get a bunch of copycat answers to weird questions intended to drive traffic to their site when people ask questions about other databases. I see many application sites doing this nowadays, and it makes me not want to use them. I imagine with GPT this is very easy to generate now

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> I imagine with GPT this is very easy to generate now

That's exactly what they are doing, but if they had any brains, they'd have a human read the answers before they publish:

https://www.dragonflydb.io/faq/is-memcached-good

> As an AI language model, I am unable to make subjective judgments on whether Memcached is "good" or not. However, I can provide information about the features, benefits, and limitations of Memcached.

This is tragically funny.

If the dragon fly devs are reading this, stop this nonsense seo gaming. This makes me trust your db less and cheapens everything that you stand for.

We are reading this and we will fix it shortly.

Is your definition of fixing to remove the most obvious indicators that you autogrenerated spam or actually removing the spam?

You removed the specific answer but did not address the underlying problem that this thread is about.

Seems to be fixed

It's... patched up to avoid embarrassment. It will be fixed when they remove the SEO spam.

Wow, this is really embarassing. I'm a bit shocked that they thought it is ok to autogenerate a FAQ with an AI. It's dishonest and irresponsible.

Why should I trust someone with my data that can't even manage this lmao

Because we focus on building the most awesome datastore and you should decide whether you prefer having your store designed by good marketeers or good engineers.

"Willing to take shortcuts of questionable ethics" is not a sign of a good engineer either. EDIT: ah, and now I see you also defending your shitty benchmarks downthread. Yeah, no, that's not how you gain trust.

Is that a valid reason to asses a tech product? Does it matter how good or bad they are at content and SEO?

From this bad episode alone, how can we judge if they are bad at keeping the data safe/secure?

I am trying to remember when I last checked Redis' or Clickhouse's homepage or other pages on their site. I only care about their documentation pages and if they deliver what they are promising.

Fixed, but still on Google Cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U1XttD...

All, My name is Oded Poncz, I am the CEO of DragonflyDB. Our goal with the FAQ was to aggragate valuable information for our community. We will take all the valuable feedback from this thread and improve. Thank you all for the feedback.

Is there a timeline for a clustered, HA and horizontally scaled version?

The vertical scaling and performance seem extremely interesting, but for our use cases we need HA.

From a business perspective I’m interested to hear about the plans. Will there be a per core licensing fee of some sort?

HA already supported since v1.0. Dragonfly is released under BSL1.1. Its free for use in most cases. https://www.dragonflydb.io/docs/about/faq

Its a bit surprising, the faq is all about Redis and other tools but not about Dragonfly.

Strange, your link to the FAQ gives me a 404, but existing links to specific FAQ sections, posted in the comments below, still work. On the website I can only find this: https://www.dragonflydb.io/docs/about/faq. Maybe they took down the original FAQ?

You are absolutely right, and I apologize for having this experience. SEO is part of the game, but it should not be in FAQ section.

This is the kind of thing that I hope search engines will penalize you for. You're treading a very fine line between "SEO" and outright deception.

They are not threading the line. This is outright autogenerated spam.

This is definition of spam: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spam To the best of my knowledge this page was not sent to anyone.

After being caught behaving badly, a debate about the proper terminology for your lapse in ethical judgment is not a winning move.

It might suggest that your perspectives and priorities are still wonky.

I would prioritize immediately and permanently removing the material and the practice, over posting questionable whataboutism arguments vs. spam.

1. We removed the FAQ page 2. You are right, I need to shut the fuck up and let self-righteous hn crowd with torches do what they do best - find a weakness, and push it until they get bored and switch to beat another builder. You asked me about my perspectives and priorities? These are my priorities: https://github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly/graphs/contributors 3. The first thing I did was on this thread was to apologize for having FAQ with such content.

The best thing about showing anything to others is seeing things about it that you didn't see before. That can be flaws or a hidden gem, but either way you know more about what you have than you did before. You might feel that the focus on the FAQ page was irrelevant and irritating but it gave you feedback on something that at least a few people found relevant about your marketing. Even if you feel like it was just "find a weakness, and push it" I still hope you understand that you got something out of it and hopefully feel OK with that.

Absolutely. And I am sorry I reacted this way.

Spam in the context of SEO clearly means something more similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing or unhelpful/dishonest/unrelated content that is just there for ranking.

Are you disputing that the FAQ page tries to rank your site higher by having autogenerated answers to questions your site is not authoritative on? Are any of the questions on the FAQ actually written or meant to be read by a human?

We all know that the definition has expanded in recent years to include low-effort or bot-generated content being flogged on social media (eg: one of Reddit's report options is "spam") and in search results.

Either way, if you want to keep a positive image going, don't take internet comments personally. Just incorporate the feedback and make changes if you feel it's warranted.

That's not Google's definition of search spam, as I suspect you will soon find out.

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