It honestly breaks my heart to write this article, but I want to be as transparent as possible with our readers because you are the ones that have quite literally…View Post
Huh… I’m not sure. Retro Dodo is got nice enough YouTube videos, but their written content could be summarized as:
“Reviews” for devices that didn’t come out yet, with extremely generic predictions and very little content.
“Top games” lists or other low effort retro gaming content, some of which was borderline AI generated given the whole “Super Mario is a classic that all gamers must play, move Mario and jump to excite your day”
And reviews for actual products that came out, though often suspiciously positive and unaware of issues other reviews had caught.
Which ultimately is going to get interpreted by Google as low effort content farming, which is indeed how Google should interpret it, as it’s correct.
Squibbles@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
They mention in the article about Reddit now being included in search results and I’ve noticed that as well. The irony there is hat Google results have been so overrun by shitty content farm sites that searching for specific things like reviews or troubleshooting for products or games was virtually useless unless you also included “Reddit” as part of your query since you were more likely to see legit people talking about product issues and solutions. Not to say Reddit isn’t astroturfed but certainly not to the level that Google’s results are. I’m not totally convinced that Google’s deal to crawl Reddit for AI purposes is directly related since bumping Reddit up in the search priority does make search results more relevant in a lot of cases.
It does seem to be an awful time for independent websites and has been for years since the big tech companies have been doing everything in their power to keep people within their walled gardens.