On linkbaiting, SEO’ing and all that other crap | :Ben Metcalfe Blog

Question:

On linkbaiting, SEO’ing and all that other crap | :Ben Metcalfe Blog:

At the end of the day, don’t people realize we’re ultimately shitting in our own nest? Can’t people see there’ll come a point when there’s just too much shit?

Answer:

Gary Ruplinger speaks... "why souldn't I piss in the town well?!?!" - The Jason Calacanis Weblog:

Of course, his push the limits to compete with the "big boys" philosophy is exactly what is destroying search. If people like this didn't exist the search indexes would be cleaner, good site owners would win out, and Google wouldn't have to waste their time on spam and could put it towards making other products.

* Gary says: "As far as I'm concerned, and I know not everyone will agree with me, but you need to be out there seeking links and promoting your site aggressively, especially if you want to compete with the "big boys."

This is a classic example of the Tragedy of the Commons.

The net has a long history of ignoring this lesson, and then spending huge resources trying to repair the damage. Think about USENET spam, and email spam -- problems and technologies 25+ years old. We're still figuring out how to fix email spam, and we solved USENET spam mostly by abandoning it for web-based things (and bringing the problems with us).

So what does the net do while we're all whining about spam? Invent wikis without any kind of protection or authorization (since added); created Wikipedia under the "we're all mature adults out for the common good" mantle (only to have the first page fight two days later, and Wikipedia is still trying to figure out how to solve its problems); blog comments without authorization (now mostly fixed); trackbacks are still completely wide open and massively broken.

For some reason, web geeks are terrible at learning from their own mistakes -- and then seem surprised when the same problems hit time after time.

And the base problem is simple: It's a commons, and it doesn't matter how many people are cooperating within that commons, all you need are the ones who only see it as a resource to be mined for their own benefit to screw it up. So if you don't design for that problem upfront; that problem will screw you over -- and we all know it's a lot easier to fix problems in design than in production, right? Or we should....

Search is just one more commons that people see a way to take value out of for personal benefit.

Given our real-world attiudes -- not worrying about sustainability, not worrying about problems we're creating for the next generations of humans, etc, etc... why are we suprised when the online world acts the same way.