Google encourages this.
Overall, it feels like no matter where you go on the internet, it's impossible to dodge content that exists primarily for the purpose of extracting money from the reader in some way. SEO spam blogs, AI startups shilling their latest product, AI generated stories posted to reddit that casually slip in a mention of how the supposed author has recently won money on a gambling website. It's all the same thing, really.
like Google or their Search team really doesn't seem to care at all. all of a sudden a random blog website just happens to rank first page on every topic
Their job is provide you just enough "results" that you don't or cant go any where else.
No more, no less.
To reiterate: Google search is shit now because they want it to be.
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ndhandala
wonder when will he submit them here.
I guess that means the log message was authored by AI as well. Figures.
Seems to check out.
If you go to the last (2356th!) page, you will see eight posts from 2023 and 2024, mostly few months apart. (But even none of those are good)
Then in 2025 @nawazdhandala starts going wild with 22 articles on January 6th. And from that point on it's basically just all him and it keeps accelerating.
Scroll down a little and you'll see a huge block of posts dated March 31st
I miss the days when we could assume that's just a pagination code bug
I have to imagine that one quality post worth reading would be linked in multiple places, thus would beat tens of thousands of slop articles for SEO purposes?
As the Berliners say:
"Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt"
or:
"Hope is the last thing to die" (or "hope dies last" if one prefers a literal translation)
People gaming the content based algorithms will eventually cause their own downfall.
I believe it is nuanced enough to have different rank per “topic”, or “keyword” etc. but admittedly just kinda guessing from the outside.
The last time I tried to build something like this I realized it’s useless without first having a gigantic amount of data already crawled. When I started crawling I realized I would never catch Google. I think without Wikipedia the LLMs might have taken 10 more years to surpass them.
<a href="https://oneuptime.com/blog" rel="nofollow">https://oneuptime.com/blog</a>
(By coincidence, see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47641829)
You basically have to use nofollow for comments otherwise your site becomes a big target for SEO link spam.
I got tired of the increasing AI slop in my YouTube Music feed and switched to Deezer a few months ago. Since then, not a single AI artist I've been able to spot. If a relatively marginal player like that can manage it, why can't Spotify or YTM? My suspicion is simply that Deezer actually actually tries.
It's the same problem with Google and search. Kagi and others have demonstrated that you can produce better results with an infinitesimal fraction of the budget, and Google is still plenty competent where they care to be. This won't start to get fixed until they see a financial incentive to do so.
https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/09/28-fully-ai-generated-mu...
Who is "we"? Definitely not Google or any other major tech company, they're all actively encouraging this.
> trusted sources.
What trusted sources are there that haven't yet been taken over by AI?
Google has been fighting aggressively to replace its search results with snippets, now generated by LLMs, to avoid sending traffic to other websites. If they continue, they will basically lead Google Search to a tipping point where a good competitor can take this market by storm. Microsoft also believed Windows is indestructible and now they have a rude awakening.
Google is trying to turn Search into that product e.g. the single answer to a given search. They could do that now with Gemini, but the ads in the results are what makes them money, and the backlash to embedding adverts into the output of Gemini would drive millions of people to OpenAI overnight. They have to do it slowly. Give it 5 years though, and search engine results pages will be a thing of the past.
Well... Maybe, but what's the point of an answer if you can't trust it? For ultra-fast answers for unimportant stuff I keep Cerebras tab open.
2020, want to know how to use Redix for Redis connections in Elixir? Google it and the results were most likely high quality, written by senior engineers who knew what they were doing
Today google that, and it will be endless amounts of slop
Well after 50 years we cant reproduce what Apollo did, and I would doubt current students of the same age would handle a 1912 Eight Grade Examination: https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam191...
- Apollo had a significantly higher accepted risk. Apollo 1 or 13 would be untenable today.
- The percent of 13-year olds that made it into and through eight grade was significantly smaller in 1912. Your average poor farming kid did not go to eighth grade.
I googled this exact sentence, and the third result was a link to the blog this post is about.
Grim.
Two things you can do:
- Navigate back and open another link. This signal is used to downrank for given query (google assumes the site did no provide satisfying answer)
- Explicitly provide result feedback. Unfortunately there isn't a category for "this is slop" but "inaccurate" works.
Do what I say, not what I do.
To fool us into thinking writing is not AI generated, we will create "human-ifying" filters to the LLM. This will introduce common keystroke, grammar, and spelling issues that surely no automation would ever create on its own.
Soon the writing most vaunted and trusted will be the writing that appears written by a 4 year old with a crayon.
Sigh.
I'll just leave this here: https://developers.google.com/search/help/report-quality-iss...
How does that work tho?
In sf too most of the scammers and scummy founders are south asian.
It’s gross and honestly as a south asian doing something legit it sucks to see them just fulfilling a stereotype.
These assholes are the same types responsible for why those societies are fucked up, being in SF most south asians I’ve met are from super wealthy families there that exploit people. Not surprising their new generation is exploiting too.
Downvote me if that upsets you but someone’s gotta call it out.
It's a lot harder / more expensive to produce, as it needs (at least before AI, and I guess still to some extent even using AI for now) to be written by someone on the team who genuinely understands the company's technology/product/whatever well enough to educate other people about it in an interesting way, rather than it being written by low wage SEO writers who just need a list of keywords to include in the drivel that is the sort of content you're talking about. So it makes sense that most companies go with the cheap option, but it's always nice to come across ones who produce actual interesting articles.
(It's what I've always opted for when I've overseen marketing budgets, and I think the ROI is usually worth it since balancing the extra cost is the fact that the benefits go from just SEO, to SEO + word of mouth of people sharing the interesting article they read, and the awareness of the brand that comes with it. So I recommend anyone who normally chooses lazy, low quality content for SEO to consider the upgrade!)
They're absolutely dominating search results. The quality isn't terrible, but there's so much content that I can't trust them to be accurate.
Don't know if they actually make any money doing it like that. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across some content-creator that said he had hundreds of faceless YouTube channels, which was made possible due to AI tools.
They have 17 million views in 2 months.
The strategy of spamming trash no-effort content definitely pays.
P.S. Or get it free when buying my $499 "how to make money selling people how to make money guides" guide!
(/s. I generally think HN comments should avoid jokes unless they're genuinely really cleverly funny, which this comment isn't - I only justified it to myself by the fact that the sort of people selling these trashy guides are the same people doing what you're talking about, and I feel they deserve mockery and shaming.)
Why would anyone read AI generated blog posts when I can just ask AI for what I need already
For gaming SEO this is still bad, no backlinks.
Interesting to see this after the fact.
1) Some time ago I was searching for growing information about a specific and uncommonly-grown plant, and was led to a top-ranked website with long pages containing everything about it, including other plants. Surprised at how prolific the writing was, I spent more than an hour on the website, taking notes, etc. Every few paragraphs it would include an amazon affiliate link to something topical, which I thought was fair. Until I realized that the links near the bottom of the page were looking more random. Then it hit me, the website is all AI-generated, and the affiliate links themselves are also AI-chosen. And everything new I "learned" from that site was now useless because I had no way to know what was grounded in actual agricultural experience and what was hallucinated.
2) Recently I did a youtube search for a book I had just finished reading, looking for some reviews. Came across a channel that was reading the book as new audio (i.e. not the original published audiobook). I thought it was a fan making it. The voice was beautiful, soothing, and natural with all kinds of relevant emotions correctly included. I started listening to the book again, until I noticed a consistent error in word ordering being made every few lines. Then it hit me! The channel even included one upload with a video recording of a seemingly-real person reading with that voice. Both the audio and video are AI-generated, but very hard to tell.
3) Next to those videos, YT recommended many strange/new channels. One had the photo and the exact voice of a famous (and now very old) physicist, with tens of clickbaity titles about controversial topics in the domain. The only tell was that the voice was too vigorous and consistently energetic, while if you've listened to that physicist before, you know his cadence is slower. At first I thought maybe the channel is reading one of his books; no, the content itself was AI-generated, maybe based on his books. There was a lot of engagement, with many comments like "mind blown" and "learned so much today".
Both #1 and #3 are harmful, because you think you're learning from a reliable source but you end up learning hallucinated nothings. #2 I didn't mind much, still enjoyed the new voice, and even preferred it over my original audible version.
Or on the other end you could have someone who wrote a sentance or two in their language and had some combination of AI generation and translation algorithm bloat it out.
In both cases you will get something that can look right and well thought out or explained, but probably will have at least some of the AI slop signs present. I don't know what the solution is for this type given claims Google Translate has started to do this kind of translation for people. An AI translation is probably just as prone to hallucinations as any other AI, but it probably will look more natural to readers than a direct translation.
If you develop the skill of judging information by its merit rather than source, you won't mind AI-generated content as long as it's helpful.
I talk to LLMs a lot. It's fucking great. Do I take everything they say at face value? No. But neither do I take at face value things that biological intelligence outputs.
> If you develop the skill of judging information by its merit rather than source..
Did you read example #1? I'm not talking about some piece of code from an LLM that you can verify or some political opinion that you can take with a grain of salt, but information that you can only gain and/or judge through expertise:
If you're not a physicist yourself, you can't judge "information by its merit" on specific physics topics, because you don't have a solid baseline.
Similarly, in growing plants, each plant has its own peculiarities, and only people experienced in growing it can tell you anything useful - it's knowledge accumulated by trial and error. Not knowledge that your "great discerning mind" can assess on its own. Even a botanist can't tell you the ideal growing conditions of a plant that they've never studied before.
--- start quote ---
These blog posts are written by the OneUptime team and open source contributors. We write about our experiences, our learnings, and our thoughts on the world of software development, Kubernetes, Ceph, SRE, DevOps, Cloud and more. We hope you find our posts helpful and insightful.
--- end quote ---
The sentinel servers, meta/google/ms/etc. just seem to be largely ignoring it, or even supporting it.
It's already nauseatingly common on all major platforms.
https://github.com/OneUptime/oneuptime/commit/538e40c4ae724e...
https://github.com/OneUptime/oneuptime/commit/2bc585df20e6bb...
You can fabricate a professional business image in a few days with AI now. It's going to be hard to build an honest brand when everyone is going to point and say "vibe coded slop" because of examples like this website.
I'm already seeing such comments whenever someone posts an app on /r/macapps and it's really discouraging for beginners. If I would have met that resistance and amount of mean comments when I launched Lunar, I would have probably never put in that amount of effort.
you can't make this up
ThrowawayR2•3h ago
MattGaiser•2h ago
A dentist buying freelance articles from a guy off Upwork is not intending to communicate anymore than this guy generating articles is.
shevy-java•2h ago
pilsetnieks•2h ago
/s
nubg•2h ago
pilsetnieks•2h ago
Just writing this made me question "what's the point" several times. If you or anyone replies cogently, I still won't have any idea if it's a person or a Chinese room.
shevy-java•2h ago
Well - I would say the internet is not totally dead yet, but we approach the point of it being very useless now. I remember the 1990s era and early 2000s - it was almost innocent compared to the total slop era we have now. Young people today don't even know that Google Search was useful at one point in time. If you use Google Search now, you get so much irrelevant crap output that it is really useless now.
thadt•1h ago
IsTom•59m ago
Meatbag spotted, get 'im boys.
agilob•2h ago
shevy-java•2h ago
senordevnyc•54m ago
post-it•2h ago
dataviz1000•1h ago
Tepix•1h ago
hackable_sand•29m ago
post-it•1h ago
abathur•1h ago
post-it•1h ago
arctic-true•1h ago