SEO is one reason that's less common.

No it isn't. SEO is about gaming the search engines to place their data ahead of everything whether relevant or not.

Yahoo was fantastic in it's time because it was human curated. No SEO could bullshit a person reading the page and categorizing it.

Google was fantastic at the start because SEO couldn't game the system. Google was famous in the early days for maintaining quality by keeping their algorithms secret and constantly changing so that SEO couldn't break their search.

I'm speaking as someone who was first on the Internet in the 80's.

No, you've got a point... Actually you're right. To an extent.

I should have qualified my post.

But I'd argue the "bad" part of SEO is just too tempting. It's clearly winning out, across the entire internet, unless you can look at me with a straight face and say "Google search is fine." Or that discoverability of genuine services is fine. It's definitely not; it's a miracle any legitimate business is surviving from web search anymore, amongts the sea of attention scams and corporate behemoths.

In other words, the I feel like the "honeymoon" where we could trust SEO to happen ethically is now behind us.

Fuck that, bring back boolean operators!!!

I mean it's worth saying that the new bots are kind of a different league to the old bots.

But now bots pass captcha and use a real browser. So… it’s not easy removing them.

And the majority of posts were mrbabyman.

I paid 5 bucks for a founder badge. I've spent more on poorer decisions but that only reduces the sting a little.

Kind of but decentralization really makes it up for it. Digg didn't even have custom communities let alone decentralization.

It's also not as SEO-gameable (since fediverse domains are inherently more fragmented than a large, high-reputation domain for SEO algorithms to rank highly), and doesn't have an inherent monetization system (unlike platforms like Twitter with their ad payouts), so that's a couple more things going for us.

The Fediverse has a lot more safeguards in place, in particular the ability to require a message to register an account, such as my instance requires, weeds out 99% of bots.

We can also defederate from instances that become overwhelmed from bots if they have lax sign-up requirements (already happened a few times), which vastly limits their ability to take hold.

The bigger problem for us, I think, is the fight against bot scrapers. Anubis is keeping them at bay for now, but it will likely be an ongoing cat and mouse game until the AI bubble bursts.

I mean, reddit only got big because Digg made some very stupid moves before, so ... pretty on brand