Hacker News Reader

Comment by gabigrin | Hacker News Reader

Thanks! Re: links, will fix it. That was the original domain but Google didn't approve it, and we can totally understand why.

Embed - it is a feature we pushed yesterday so still no proper documentation on that. It's as simple as importing images -> clicking on an "embed" button and grabbing the iframe code. Requires some technical understanding. We might improve to be platform-specific (Webflow, Wix) if there's a real need.

And as for the guides you're seeing are complete gen-AI slob, I agree. Not something we're that proud of, but mostly for SEO to be able to acquire users at a reasonable price. We're running ads campaigns but with our low pricing, it'll be really hard to be profitable so SEO is one way.

View on HN

I work on landing pages occasionally that have to account for SEO so can definitely sympathise with the uphill battle here. Like the OP, I was immediately put off of the "brand" when I saw the flood of AI stuff. It's like seeing how the sausage is made.

I think there's an extra level of trust that needs building from a branding perspective because of how personal it feels to hand over personal images to someone to host for you, even if they become public anyway. It's interesting to see how people react to this sort of thing as it's very new.

Good luck!

Co-founder of MyPhotos here,

You're right about trust being important. We're working hard to show that we're real people with good intentions.

I actually didn't consider that using AI to generate some blogposts (that aren't the main content of the site) would have negative impact on how people perceive the product. So thanks, we appreciate the feedback and will take it into account moving forward.

The problem for me is not the SEO, but the vast AI blather, which is virtually content-free. You need a complete rewrite by an experienced human. After reading and reading, all I found was subjective comments about how great all the features are, without any information about the features themselves. What is your relation to Google? Can photos only come into your site from Google?

> I actually didn't consider that using AI to generate some blogposts (that aren't the main content of the site) would have negative impact on how people perceive the product.

As a cofounder you already know your product. I don’t, and one quick and easy way to discover is crawling your site (testing your product comes second as I need a bit of confidence before sharing my google credentials). Bad copyrighting (ai gen or not) depict one interest of having more customer while not much interest in sharing useful information on the subject. I don’t know about your motives so I can only trust you "are real people with good intention" and wish you good luck, but as an anonymous visitor I surely would have passed my way.

If the guide posts aren’t mean for humans but the robots, maybe hide the link in a SEO friendly way? 10px off screen or z-indexed bellow another block for exemple.

Also a header disclaimer would be very appreciated: "Content for SEO, back home"

I think it depends on the target audience. For casual photographers many might not care about AI but poor curation makes it look cheap. For artists, if they see any hint of even minimal AI usage or hints that you may approve of gen AI it would be a total dealbreaker. For the subset of tech minded people that approve of AI, they probably already know how to host a site -> but maybe they are still a viable audience if this saves them a lot of {time|money|maintenance}.

SEO has changed a lot over the past year. It is now very hard to be featured on the top of the first page even with the best content. Several colleagues have seen their search engine traffic plummet 50-80%.

I recommend going for other marketing strategies such as collaborations with bloggers and influencers in your niche (photo enthusiasts?). Better targeted, less vulnerable to the whims of Google's algorithm.

> And as for the guides you're seeing are complete gen-AI slob, I agree. Not something we're that proud of, but mostly for SEO to be able to acquire users at a reasonable price.

no, this is a skill issue. follow fofr_ai to get tips on getting realistic photos. its not hard, you just havent tried.

Yeah, you're right. We're gonna fix the images ASAP. They are indeed embarrassing. Also, the term "guides" is misleading as it sounds like documentation, which it isn't.

Thanks for the feedback!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com