"antcolonylive dot com" is a terrible content farm of a website. It has the vague shape of an ant blog, but with tons of "articles" that mention US states and particular ant species names. The descriptions are either AI generated or written by someone with no direct knowledge of the ants. Many of the images are incorrectly identified. It's garbage.
So I have to ask: why does it exist? I can only think of one reason.
Someone, probably a small owner of an ant and pet supply shop purchases an SEO package to promote their website. And this kind of fake site is a part of the promotion. Since I like and know many people who run such shops I will assume they didn't know this would be the result of buying advertising. But this is what advertising has become: information pollution.
It's also possible it was made in anticipation of selling such "algorithm boosting" in the future to such sites.
There are online guides that will teach you how to make such garbage websites for the purpose of improving your page rank and getting more customers. They suggest imitating the kind of personal specialist blogs whose recommendations carry weight in your field or market.
A kind mention of a particular seller in a real article about ants by someone who knows about ants is a boon.
Worse such real content is obviously struggling to survive.
Antwiki.org loads so slowly it's a running joke. Formiculture (a great ant forum) has similar issues.
But, the fake SEO boosting sites? They load quickly, they have the cash for fast servers.
Someone said we were going back to the days of handmade lists of links. It would make me feel better if there were a way to submit the URLs of content farms somewhere for blacklisting.
I guess I should make a guide to the best ant information on the web. That might make me feel better.
I already donate to many nonprofit informational websites. I worry not enough people do this. I also worry that those who care just won't have the time to fight the tidal waves of garbage.
This is antkeeping! It's obscure! how are we getting spammed and enshittified. We're too small for this attention!
@futurebird I do think they have motivation to fix this. Because Google having dethroned the giants of its age, Google should be very aware of the opportunities an unusable search engine offers.
That was how they got started.
@mensrea@futurebird
a) why will people continue using Google, if it only delivers garbage results? Especially once alternatives start springing up more publicly.
b) Ads need to generate value to be booked, meaning paying customers at the merchants buying these ads. If Google Ads deliver only garbage traffic, why will merchants continue to book them? Good search results drive conversion strong customer cohorts.
@rlcw@mensrea@futurebird Alternatives face the same problem Google does - how to tell good content from bad without actual expertise. The gap between their judgement and real expertise is where SEO gets its foothold.
I've heard it suggested that digital ads are a bubble, that the info advertisers use to make purchasing decisions isn't as good as they assume it is and ads aren't driving the real world profit to justify the industry. It's a scary thought but I don't know that it's false.
@nowan@mensrea@futurebird It depends on the type of business model you have, and competence of marketing teams. One company I worked with stopped Ads for a month and the number of conversions did not change. I've known other companies with more data savvy marketing teams who are very diligent about constantly optimising their spend and ad channels. A big differentiator was if the marketing teams success measure was tied to conversion or clicks on page. So its not only Google being evil...
@rlcw@mensrea@futurebird I'm sure there are conscientious marketers out there who understand what their ad dollars are buying them. At a macro level, though, it's hard to credit that the vast sums of money in the programatic ad industry (and paying for all this LLM-gennerated, SEO-optimized nonsense) are matched by equally vast returns for advertisers.
Unfortunately, as much as I dislike programatic ads I suspect a correction would be as bad for the internet I like as for that I don't.
@futurebird Oh, man. This sounds exactly like "sewingiscool dot com", an awful content farm that comes up in searches for vintage sewing machines and is full of incoherent garbage content and stolen photos. It predates the current generative AI bubble by many years, so it's artisanal garbage. I'm sure I've reported it multiple times; nobody cares.
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