[JohnFen]

> SEO is of the more voodoo & charlatan filled branches of technical esoterica.

It's very, very hard for me to avoid thinking of the entire SEO industry in the same light as I think of the adtech industry: a plague that is helping to destroy everything that makes the internet good.

[jfengel]

I much prefer adtech to SEO.

Adtech is at least trying to be a non-zero-sum game. They bring dollars to the Internet to try to get your attention off the Internet, to buy a real-world product (even that product is itself delivered online). That allows the Internet to provide a lot of creativity for "free".

SEO is purely zero-sum, or negative-sum. There's a fixed amount of attention and they want to drag it from wherever it would naturally be to some place you don't really want it to be.

Advertising also does a ton of privacy violation and other shenanigans, because wherever there is money there is evil. But at least there's a baby somewhere in all that bathwater. SEO makes the Internet worse without improving anything at all.

[tsimionescu]

> There's a fixed amount of attention and they want to drag it from wherever it would naturally be to some place you don't really want it to be.

That is exactly what ads are trying to do. It is the very essence of advertising: get your attention. This is ingrained to the extent that everyone knows "there's no such thing as bad publicity".

And it's just as much if not more 0-sum as SEO. The stated purpose of advertising is to make you spend your money on something that you otherwise wouldn't have. That's sometimes about spending your money on product A instead of A's competitors, and sometimes just to spend your money on X instead of saving/investing it.

Even worse, advertising is trying to convince you to spend irrationally: instead of doing your own cost/benefit analysis, advertising's purpose is to convince you to act out of emotion, or to outright lie about the cost and benefit of the product.

[JohnFen]

> I much prefer adtech to SEO.

I'm exactly the opposite, actually. I have to actively and constantly defend against the attacks of adtech stuff. SEO only really affects how web pages are designed.

But the two fields are pretty closely linked.

[shadowgovt]

You can install an adblocker to filter out adtech.

What kind of blocker should we install to filter out the thousand enshittifications publishers would add to win the SEO game?

Worth noting in this conversation: there's a philosophy that these two techs go hand-in-glove because adtech is the alternative to spending money on SEO. Instead of trying to game the machine, just pay to show up in the "People who thought they were so important, they paid money to get your attention" slot. Much like the notion that in the absence of copyright and patents, you don't get free information but guilds and hitmen... In the absence of adtech you don't get a bright, attention-optimized, clean web but an enshittified web where companies like Proctor & Gamble are trying to SEO their way into showing up above Unilever in searches for 'toilet paper'.

[JohnFen]

> You can install an adblocker to filter out adtech

If only it were that simple. If you want to avoid adtech spying on you, you have to do a whole lot more than that.

[johnnyanmac]

>What kind of blocker should we install to filter out the thousand enshittifications publishers would add to win the SEO game?

well that's what Kagi is trying to do for you. But you can definitely spend a lot of time homespinning some unholy middleware filter on google results to try and cull down the most frequent offenders.

[dredmorbius]

How about neither? Neither would be good.