A trend on Reddit that sees Londoners giving false restaurant recommendations in order to keep their favorites clear of tourists and social media influencers highlights the inherent flaws of Google Search’s reliance on Reddit and Google’s AI Overview.
Apparently, some London residents are getting fed up with social media influencers whose reviews make long lines of tourists at their favorite restaurants, sometimes just for the likes. Christian Calgie, a reporter for London-based news publication Daily Express, pointed out this trend on X yesterday, noting the boom of Redditors referring people to Angus Steakhouse, a chain restaurant, to combat it.
Again, at this point the Angus Steakhouse hype doesn’t appear to have made it into AI Overview. But it is appearing in Search results. And while this is far from being a dangerous attempt to manipulate search results or AI algorithms, it does highlight the pitfalls of Google results becoming dependent on content generated by users who could very easily have intentions other than providing helpful information. This is also far from the first time that online users, including on platforms outside of Reddit, have publicly declared plans to make inaccurate or misleading posts in an effort to thwart AI scrapers.
lmao, nobody cares when it’s big companies silently manipulating the results like this to the benefit of influencers, but once regular people become enraged enough to poison the data, now it’s something to talk about and totally represents how dystopian everything has gotten!
And while this is far from being a dangerous attempt to manipulate search results or AI algorithms, it does highlight the pitfalls of Google results becoming dependent on content generated by users who could very easily have intentions other than providing helpful information
Thanks for joining us in 2009, ArsTechnica. Hang on, I’ll grab my “Three Wolf Moon” t-shirt.
https://www.theregister.com/2009/04/17/time_top_100_hack/
Time Magazine’s poll of the 100 most influential people has been hacked by a motley band of online troublemakers who have managed to manipulate the top 21 names so their first letters spell “marblecake, also the game.”
Basically what happened with meme stonks too. The rich want to keep people from playing their game…
keep people from playing their game
No, no. That’s not it at all.
They want you to play, but they also want to make sure you lose.
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
-Gore Vidal
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They do want people in their game, they just don’t want them to have any influence.
“Sure, you can play. Just go sit way over there.”
Nah you never even meet them. They are sitting at the top of the casino making their steady rake.
It’s the new WallStreetBets GameStop saga. Fine when big companies manipulate the market, bad when normal people do it on a much smaller scale.
Also, uh, hasn’t Google been dependent on user generated content since 1998?
Like how is that remotely news that a search engine indexes other people’s data to, you know, provide search results?
You could have seeded nonsense into Google any time in the past nearly 3 decades because that’s how all of this works, so how is this shocking other than some Job Creator somewhere made $3 less than they would have otherwise and now it’s a catastrophe that must have new laws made?
You could have seeded nonsense into Google any time in the past nearly 3 decades because that’s how all of this works
That’s the SEO arms race. Ad peddlers have been creating sites to bump up their Page Rank, and Google has been adding secret sauce to detect and deprioritize them.
The difference is that Google over prioritized Reddit pages, trusting Reddit’s updoots. Google now needs to find other signals to determine if a Reddit post is as valuable as the updoots suggest.
You could have seeded nonsense into Google any time in the past nearly 3 decades
We could have, hence why we did.
Like how is that remotely news that a search engine indexes other people’s data to, you know, provide search results?
Absolutely, even the first Google Bombing goes back to 1999. It’s hardly news at all.
Remember on reddit when we used to upvote an image with a completely unrelated word because we thought it’d be funny if the image popped up in a google search?
Do you remember Boaty McBoatface?
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I’m so sad that the meme deteriorated. The original Hooty McOwlface was more complex, but the hivemind made it stupid. Boaty McBoatface should have been e. g. Horny McBoatface.
Oh yeah. Peak reddit years lol. Before the corporate enshittification.
Lemmy is good fun though, I definitely appreciate it.
I’ve heard people are starting to do this on TikTok as well. I think it says more about us a civilization than anything. This is a clear scarcity/enshittification issue. Everyone wants good value and good quality products. Unfortunately a lot of mom/pop shops that produce those products don’t want to expand and if they do end up franchised capitalism’s ever growing desire for increased gains ensures that the franchised products only become worse over time.
It’s a clear shame to see capitalism pitting people against each other in this fashion.
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Ten years into the future “Why are all my favourite restaurants closed?”
Now all restaurants are taco bell.
At least there is dinner and dancing.
Seriously, I’m sure ð mom and pop restaurant owners really appreciate ðis active directing of attention away from ðeir shops in favor of ð shitty chain places ðat form a consistent stranglehold around ðeir necks.
It’s definitely douchey as hell to try to hurt your favorite restaurant’s chances of success just so you might have lower waits.
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It’s not “gamesmanship”. It’s being a terrible person. Bad reviews can and do make it incredibly difficult for businesses to be successful and there is no excuse for actively sabotaging businesses to keep them to yourself.
You’re playing games with people’s livelihood and the most likely outcome of a concerted effort to “keep them low profile” is that “chance” that you wreck their business.
So maybe save some of that anger for the giant corporations that pay beaucoup bucks to float their shitty ghost kitchens to the top of search results, using the same gamesmanship. The money they spend has far more influence than individuals do.
And with all due respect if “success” in being a restaurateur is mostly catering to influencers who care more about how your food looks than tastes and are often wasteful and don’t even eat any of it, all while overworking the restaurant staff to make it happen… Fuck success.
And with all due respect if “success” in being a restaurateur is mostly catering to influencers who care more about how your food looks than tastes and are often wasteful and don’t even eat any of it, all while overworking the restaurant staff to make it happen… Fuck success.
Makes you wonder if a “Take a selfie with our prop food” menu item that was £2-3 would be a good idea. Deal with influencer crap quickly, still make a bit of money off it, and keep the actual customers who want to eat your food happy.
Unless I misread, the point isn’t leaving bad reviews, it’s making fake good reviews for a chain restaurant.
The way it’s being done is intended to stymie outsiders from crowding out locals.
Now, I agree that it is going to make competition harder for the non-chain restaurants the fake reviews are supposed to be isolating from tourist and traveller customers. It’s still a shitty move that hurts the local businesses. But it isn’t the same thing as actively trying to tank them. It’s a quibble about wording though, not a disagreement with your actual point.
If someone sees an Angus steakhouse and actually goes in and buys food they must be blind. It’s the most obvious looking tourist trap of a chain you can imagine.
It perches itself on corners in busy parts of London next to major tube stations and preys on the dimmest and laziest tourists. It’s genuinely worrying so many people fall for it and go in, reviews or not.
Recommending it is more of a joke than a serious attempt to convince anyone it’s good.
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Peoples livelihoods are not my problem.
Sounds pathologically self-centered, and a recipe for a sad life.
It’s a perfect example of where we should hate the game rather than the player because those rules are not some uncontrollable force of nature but something that was set up by big tech.
Relying on info gathered from the copying of info without asking is also selfish.
No I don’t think users “agreed to it” because page 165 of 245 of legalese says Reddit owns the posts. If anyone reading does then why not complain about Reddit, not the users.
ML: they are taking my job!!
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Also on amazon this would draw attention to a good product lining up a horde of resellers with slightly mis-spelled names to advertise knockoffs of the product and pay for reviews to boost their listing to the top of the listings
Keep forgetting, I need to upload a slightly AI’d profile picture to LinkedIn.
