Comment by seanp2k2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanp2k2 | Hacker News Reader

Is this new? Near-gibberish "blogs" that are part of link rings have been around for at least a decade or so. Places used to sell "SEO" services where they'd have hundreds of automated wordpress blogs that would link to each other (to increase their inbound link count which affected Google SERP placement and PageRank) and to the target site / product. It worked quite well. The modern equivalent I see a ton of is when I search for something like "best _____ 2023" looking for reviews, I get a bunch of sites that just list a dozen terrible Amazon products with affiliate links to each. They're not actual reviews, they just re-state the product description but frame it as a review. It's obvious that the person / machine writing these "posts" has zero experience with the product, as they tend to point out irrelevant features and basically just say that every single one is a great choice, when none of the products mentioned are any mainstream known-good brands. Of course, when I just tried a few examples ("hammocks", "work boots", "steam irons", "backpacks") I couldn't find any of these sites, so maybe they've cleaned up lately, but I swear for the past few years it seemed like every search result for products led inevitably to an Amazon affiliate link farm blog.

Don't forget the asinine translation sites with page descriptions like "Have you ever wondered what the Sinhalese word for 'monitor lizard' is[1]? Millions of users have searched for this. In this page you will find..." at which poing the summary cuts off. Somebody generated those in an afternoon with a set of concordances and a Perl script, and they've been sucking traffic ever since.

[1] For the curious, "Thalagoya" for the terrestrial species, "Kabaragoya" for the swimming species

“You won’t believe how many words the Sinhalese have for monitor lizards!”

"Slow lorises hate this one simple trick!"

"Find hot lonely monitor lizards in your area today!"

And the sites that list every possible phone number in a given area code, just so that they'll be a search hit for someone searching for a phone number. Zero value provided there.

those are usually for "is this a spam" vote, so I would argue that there is some value there

I'm not talking about the ones that provide a user-contributable database of "what business owns this number, is it spam"; those are great.

I'm talking about sites that just list all possible phone numbers in a range, for SEO purposes, with no useful information about each number, and then try to sell you access to their invasive databases of personal information.

Ha! Somewhat unrelated, but that reminded me of a homeless guy in Portland whose intro line was "do you know how you say dragonfly in Spanish?", to which I responded "libélula" (I knew it because Spanish is my mother tongue). Interesting, he seemed kinda pissed off, as I spoiled his soliciting routine. Maybe he's the human version of those sites!

And if you click through, you'll find that they don't have the Sinhalese word for monitor lizard, but you can contribute it for them to monetize.

I see automatic translation of normal websites a lot too. I'm French and doing some home renovations, and according to google our houses are built in a way that is vastly different from my experience on the ground, and it's really frustrating, because our regulations and customs are different, and I really need to do things the local way.

> I get a bunch of sites that just list a dozen terrible Amazon products with affiliate links to each. [...] maybe they've cleaned up lately

The faucet turned off in 2020, when Amazon reduced affiliate payouts for many products [1] and cut off third-party affiliate networks [2]. There are still a lot of those sites around, but there's no longer the same level of incentives for them to be created.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/14/amazon-slashes-commission-ra...

[2]: https://www.adexchanger.com/ecommerce-2/amazon-removes-third...

YouTube removing the dislike count destroyed that site's usefulness for reviews. Now there's no good way to tell the algorithmically created videos from genuine reviews without watching them, which then inflates the generated crap videos higher. Big channels can still do product reviews but reviews from average people are now unfindable under a sea of generated sewage content. Since big channels often are sponsored (and not always disclosed regardless of YouTube policy) and have a very narrow range of products they review, a huge chunk of functionality died the day YouTube decided to protect the feelings of political campaign staffers while tossing an enormous amount of content completely unrelated to US political ideological struggles into the void.

There's an addon called Return YouTube Dislike. I use it on FF and it seems to have put the thumbs-down count back... not sure how they get the numbers but it looks right to me

Is this specific to a genre of videos?

Upvotes/Downvotes never told me anything useful. The thumbmnail image, subject line and number of views are usually enough for me to know whether I want to give it a shot or not.

Ive seen actual gibberish blogs consisting of random Unicode characters (often within a specific rangr(). What are those

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