3d ago

Google is Using AI to Censor Independent Websites

travellemming.com

40 comments

This is why I shut The Den of Amateur Writing down after 25 years of running and developing it. I had written the entire codebase for Googles SEO, rolled out the update so my users would see a bit more traffic trickle in, and then watched them delist all my URLs 3 months later when this change rolled out. I just gave up. It was taking way too much of my life fighting googles bullshit to provide a free community.
- I'd not heard of your site before, but it sounds like it was a cool thing while it lasted. That seems to be the trend of the day. The cool things are giving way to very dumb things.
  
  It really was a great thing. It happened naturally too. Started as just a site I posted my writing to, a personal site in 1997, and friends wanted to add their stuff. By 1999 it was renamed from Routhy's Den to the Den of Amateur Poetry, and then the domain was purchased and the site renamed to The Den of Amateur Writing.
  I still remember the pre-PHP days. People would email their works to me and I would manually build an HTML page and update the site within 24 hours.
- SEO is scummy.
  
  Yep, I fought against it for years but eventually my new user intake was lower than the rate at which the typical user would fizzle out and move on. We had users that were there for 20 years and regulars, but without fresh ideas and posts things would get stale. So I had to yield and start adhering. Around 2018-2019 things really took a dive in traffic and I could not afford ads as it was all completely out of pocket, so I started a new codebase and rewrote it over 4 years in my spare time. The site before it shut down had a top grade from all of Googles site scanners and I had thought "Perfect.. now folks will trickle in again at the right rate.". And then the delisting.

40 comments