I wonder how many people have successfully bootstrapped acting gigs this way. Perhaps not the guy in the example, as his various poorly written bios expose him. But surely there are people that are better at this game.
Why even bother with getting an acting gig where they'll figure out you can't even act? Just fake the fame (is it fake if Google says it's real?), and get free meals, etc (hah, I guess Instagram was the platform for this a while ago).
There are people like the fake heiress Anna Sorokin who faked being wealthy, who's even getting movie deals after being caught, but never admitting to being wrong (this statement not checked for accuracy, I just noticed an interview where she seems to be claiming it's all been a misunderstanding). The world's a funny place.
A Formula 1 racer got his career started when he got himself a lift with 2 bosses of 2 different teams - each of them thought he was friends with the other guy. He talked his way into a driving job, but of course, once there, he had to show he could race.
Seo is a fair play and I don't see why we are so quick to blame young people. It is Google that should be blamed for making themselves more important than they deserve to be.
A lot of what is labeled and sold as "SEO" might as well be diet fraud. Plagiarism, false advertising, astroturfing, etc. It certainly isn't just letting the Google bot know what your website is about.
I agree, though I think it's fair play to try and do things that the Google algorithm likes...but are not directly related to quality.
Say somewhere in the bowels of their ML pipelines, features that get scored include things like "has a favicon.ico and it's unique and not seen elsewhere". Well, then doing that isn't really fraud to me. It's just adding "proxies for quality" so you aren't dinged for not having them.
Ummm, this is SEO? Because it is a hack from google's algo? This is exactly my problem with the "hackers" here and the article's author - conflating the action with content. He finds an unscroupolous usage of that hack and generalizes without any effort that all of it is fraud.
It is not okay to glide over the 'young people' part and generally not being empathetic to those trying to beat the market. If it is fraud, which is a crime, are you suggesting these people should be sent to jail? Because if not then you shouldn't use the that word. Words have meaning.
I would love to have a way to punish people for submitting knownlingly bad information to publicly editable databases like IMDB (note I don't care about Google, it is IMDB that should be protected)
Jail is too much, but it woukd be nice to have a fine of some sort, because "poisining the well" for everyone is really not cool.
(in practice any such system would be abused a lot, so we are probably better off with status quo.. but in the ideal world we'd punish those people)
Public service, if you think jail is too much. An hour for each word of the falsehood, 1000 hours for each picture included.
Poisoning the well is a deeply antisocial act, and just because it isn't the literal town water well, but is instead the common information well, doesn't make it less of an 'eff-you-all' act.
Right. We can achieve heaven if we just punish every sin. Not trusting almighty Google's algorithm is just too much sacrifice the good people are making.
Promoting publicly editable database as authoritative is high bar we must achieve at the cost of just banning juvenile behavior.
No, "we can reduce reduce bad behavior if we punish for it". This stuff actually works -- if we don't punishing bad behavior, we get more and more of it over time (which is kinda what happened with internet)
I am not sure why you keep bringing up Google here -- no one cares about it, it is megacorp and it can take care of itself. We want to protect entities like IMDB and Wikipedia. It does not matter why it was vandalized (and that's what happened here) -- to fool Google, or to impress friends, or to get to backstage -- it was bad, and it should not be encouraged.
And finally, learning that actions have responsibilities is an important part of the growing up. I certainly got some parking tickets when I was younger and it taught me an important lesson. (Of course the punishment should not be excessive, nothing that stays on your record for the whole life).
There are people like the fake heiress Anna Sorokin who faked being wealthy, who's even getting movie deals after being caught, but never admitting to being wrong (this statement not checked for accuracy, I just noticed an interview where she seems to be claiming it's all been a misunderstanding). The world's a funny place.
A Formula 1 racer got his career started when he got himself a lift with 2 bosses of 2 different teams - each of them thought he was friends with the other guy. He talked his way into a driving job, but of course, once there, he had to show he could race.