The Future Internet is rip-off/black hat based | Hacker News Reader

The Future Internet is rip-off/black hat based

rarestblog.com

85 pointsrarestblog27 comments

The Scribd tactic, mentioned in this article, is particularly shitty. Linking to articles under Google search terms increases SEO, but it still feels dirty.

I've never heard of Twine before, but I'm writing them to tell them in advance to bar content from my URLs. Is it a big site that I've never heard of before? Also: How would one set up a content policy on a web site forbidding use of the text published within? Certainly it's possible to make an attempt to persecute these copiers?

Scribd earned my permanent disdain for spamming engines with irrelevant content. Part of it is not their fault - my browser's flash plugin is very choosy and likes to lock up and crash my browser when their embedded pdf loads. But combine that with the fact that I've been repeatedly misled to their documents in the first place and I have a sort of Pavlovian response going.

(Not that I blame the Scribd guys for this. I would use and have used similar tactics, but it does have its costs.)

They wanted to become the "Youtube for documents" and they did. Nobody that I know of has a better docstorage method, and, like Youtube, Scribd feels cheap and often gives me results that lied about what they were to get views. I'm not mad at Scribd for doing that, since it worked, but I have to wonder who would willingly demean his life's work for the sake of popularity. Perhaps that's just my pretension speaking.

"Nobody that I know of has a better docstorage method..."

HTML.

"I stopped doing black hat, because it backfired, I’ve seen spam everywhere I went in the net. Often I stumbled into my own sites, when searching for something. That bothered me a lot!"

Nice try, but somehow, I don't believe you. This just sounds like a new pitch.

Actually, no it's possible.

I did "blackhat" back in 2006 and had about 500,000 pages indexed into Google. A few real queries and I saw my own site as the first few listings.

P.S. I should elaborate why I saw my own listings.

The 500,000 pages that I had indexed in Google were mostly mispellings/typo pages of the top 500,000 searched keywords in terms of volume.

So you can see statistically, it's very possible to come upon your own sites...

However the rant was interesting and perhaps informative. Therefore, I don't care what the guy does really or why he made this rant.

This guy is thinking too small, which reflects the year he stopped spamming. The problem is not high value keyword spam creation or even long tail spam creation or link cramming, the next frontier is legit unique low quality content ... and lots of it.

The stuff he's talking about is easy to spot and easy to kill, when the content is unique and low in quality but extremely high in number, the game changes completely.

What we need is an adblockplus for black hat sites.

yeah, but the big problem is who is managing the blacklists...

UGC, a firefox tool bar that lets you flag stuff. If a user searches for something, and the first result is bullshit, chances are they'll be pissed enough to take the extra step to "punish" them by flagging the result

Who watches the watchmen

I was linked to a ripoff site today and it took me a couple of minutes to locate the original article - they didn't provide a backlink. I emailed them of course, but they clearly know and do this on purpose. Makes me sad.

We get a lot of people syndicating our blogs' content and have to get AOL legal to serve them with notices to take it down - that works, but not everyone has such resources at their disposal.

There's a startup specializing in tracking webspam:

http://www.attributor.com/

Here's the (old) TechCrunch article:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/04/attributor-launches-ser...

This is a great rant that highlights a lot of the dark side of Google's ranking and AdSense, with respect to web quality and honesty.

It's too bad that 10 years from now, people may not be able to read this rant to help understand the evolution of the web -- because he's blocked all robots from visiting (including the archival robots of the Internet Archive, where I work).

This problem is related to DRM. There is no way to stop people from making copies.

There certainly is a way of stopping people from printing those copies wholesale on their web sites. If I put up entire albums free for download on my site, I'd have some angry bands after me.

I'm fine with the things I put online being passed around, but when a site replicates it all and takes my traffic, it means I lose viewers and popularity. I dislike things like FriendFeed as-is, because I don't like that there's no way to track conversations about me online. (Somebody ought to make a solution to this so I can give them some money.) It's much worse if they're actually stealing my writing rather than just linking back.

What is the way for stopping the copying, that you assert there certainly is?

If two people hand in the same essay in school, how do you know who actually wrote it? It is a judgment.

There is no way to make such a judgment without seriously violating the usefulness and the current M.O. of the internet.

I am not talking about what you think is fine or not fine I am talking about what is possible and actually happening.

If two people hand in the same essay in school, how do you know who actually wrote it? It is a judgment.

A judgment based on things like writing style analysis, which is pretty easy. I have blogs steal my posts wholesale pretty often, and most people stealing your writing do a really shitty job of it.

I am not talking about what you think is fine or not fine I am talking about what is possible and actually happening.

What is actually happening is that so far nobody gives a damn about writing enough to prevent blatant infringement. It's not an incredibly hard problem. Youtube is solving a much harder problem with their audio/video copyright issues, and while their solution isn't perfect it's certainly stopped me from using them to reliably find movies and songs. The music I do find there is the sort of stuff that's not popular enough for the band to care. If they did, those videos would be gone within hours.

Remember that there's a copyright on text just as there is on anything else. Nobody enforces their copyrights because so far there aren't particularly huge rip-offs that are costing writers money, but if somebody ever does create anything that's effectively leeching then suing him would be ridiculously easy, since on the Internet everything is archived and most things are stored with dates. You couldn't possibly steal one of my blog posts and get away with claiming it's yours, and so if I care enough to go after you you have no defense and have clearly broken the law.

Ironically, this is due to the lack of a text content industry service that crawls for copyrighted works -- like the ??AA.

They're having such a hard time because it's not automated yet and they care too much. Providing for free (or with attribution) is fine. Plagiarism is not.

In other words, RIAA shouldn't employ MediaSentry; MediaSentry should sign up content producers for cheap p2p checking and a MediaSentry analog for text should sign up content producers for cheap copy checking.

New model: bloggers and newspapers make money from ads, spend money on content checking. If your content can't support its own uniqueness via ads->anti-plagiarism, you lose.

Thoughts?

but if somebody ever does create anything that's effectively leeching then suing him would be ridiculously easy (emphasis added)

The problem is, according to the rant, that everybody is doing it.

Persecution doesn't necessarily mean a lawsuit, when it's an instantly verifiable claim. If everybody is doing it, then it's a matter of finding and reporting those people, and either having it removed or pressing charges against the criminals involved. (Once it reaches that point, a lot of people will find ways to stop ripping off writers. I hope it doesn't reach that point any time soon.

It's time to create a bugtraq for black hat SEO, a strong full disclosure group will uncover page rank exploits.

facebook will save us.. ;)

Anti-ripp-off software is an emerging market.

perhaps so is internet law, tricky waters to surf on I think.

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