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I've been on the internet for a long time. Though my first encounter with it was sometime in '94 or early '95, via Mosaic on the 386 at my mother's office, I count my real start to be late '95. Barely a teen, and having been immersed in the online world for mere months via BBSs (which I loved, which I will always love, and which I didn't know then were dying), I used a cracked copy of Telix and my 2400 bps modem to dial up a free community access internet project. I'd written out my application form in person, mailed it in. A few weeks later I received instructions, a username, a default password. So I added it to my directory, called it, and got started.
It wasn't fancy, but if you're here in Geminispace, reading this, you would've loved it. It was streamlined. The command prompt was hidden. Web access via lynx, email through pine, and tin for Usenet. FTP was disabled, but we figured out FTP-to-email mirrors; telnet was disabled, but I had other means (my friend's older brother's university shell account login). It was basic but it was great. For a year and a half, until I got a part time job that let me get a better computer and a faster modem, it was my window to the online world. That time is faint in my memory because of the distance, and because of everything else going on in my life. But I made a website, just text and links. I posted on Usenet, read posts on the technical and the occult, perused alt.magick and various groups under rec.games.*. On the web, I used search engines to find other interesting pages, which were, at that point, inevitably written and maintained by a single person. Andy's Star Control page. Kaci's flute page. Corporations hadn't gotten their claws on the internet yet, hadn't broken it beyond repair. Google hadn't been founded, Google hadn't been ruined. It was straight-up a great time to be online.
(As an aside: amfora, the now-abandoned terminal-based Gemini browser, gives me heavy vibes for those times, for that terrible yet expansive part of my life)
It's easy to throw out cliched phrases like "change is the only constant", but we saw it play out, slowly and then quickly. The early search engines like Altavista and Lycos, which seemed good enough at the time, were in retrospect slow and kinda shit. When Google arrived, they were absolutely destroyed. Google had better results, and Google was fast. A list of sites in under a second? It felt like magic. If I squint, it still feels a bit like magic. Well, the speed, but not the results. Slowly but surely, the sites around me were changing. Not just the addresses, but everything about them. People stopped making their own websites. It was easier, we were told, it was better, if we just signed up for social media instead. Why make a site when you can just make a profile? Add your friends! Talk to them! Leave all the site-making and updating to us. HTML is hard, and fiddly, and anyway, wouldn't you rather be having fun?
All of us who used to make websites stopped doing so, or mostly, by and large. But some of us realized that all the years we'd spent deep in pico and notepad, applying other people's HTML, CSS, and JS, didn't have to go to waste. As long as there have been search engines there has been the first page, the above-the-fold: this is where you, the person with things to hawk, want to be. I remember how page two was death, how few people even checked beyond the initial results. Google would give you endless pages, 136,327 results found. But it was the first 10 or 20 that counted. The solution was clear: if you wanted to be seen, you needed to be near the top of the list. Ideally the top. To be off-page was to be invisible. And that's where SEO came in.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process by which people attempt to place a site as high as possible in the results of a search engine, which for all practical purposes now means Google. Bing's been around for a while, but nobody cared. Nobody cares. Its market share hovers in the low single digits, no matter what generative AI sludge Microsoft pours in. Google's been the only game in town for almost twenty-five years, now. And around it has risen a type of person devoted to topping its rankings.
The people who ruined the internet
Amanda Chicago Lewis, in the Verge, has written an excoriating article about the people who have dragged us down to where we're at now. She starts off on a rooftop party for SEOs (they apparently call themselves this; the need to rhyme with CEO feels strangely appropriate) which promises a ten-foot alligator in a pool. The alligator's there, but they've lied about its size: it's only maybe five feet long. The piece is off to a rollicking start. From that rooftop in Florida, because of course it's Florida, she talks to all sorts of people who are apparently big deals in the SEO game. From there, it's around the country to talk to others: New York City, Denver, etc. It seems like so many of the people she talks about are larger than life, and if I have any complaint about this article, it's that it paints everyone who works in SEO as a grandiose alligator-party-attender, or the owner of an NYC consultancy, or similar. But this isn't true; cannot be true. The scope of the modern internet is so vast that a few dozen, a few hundred people can't move it on its own. Not anymore. The sort of organization required to really break things requires an entire industry of high priests and acolytes, its techniques assiduously ranked and disseminated.
Her article focuses on a particular type of SEO worker - many of them own their own company, have made many thousands of dollars a month, work crushing schedules and wonder where their lives went. And it's a great piece, detailing all the ways in which they get up every day and try to get things ranked higher, so that they can sell you something, and poison the online commons just a little bit more. What it misses is the dark matter of SEO: all the people who work for companies and who also have a hand in this stuff. Your marketers, your brand team, the web developers they work with. SEO is everywhere because every corporation wants to be at the top of your rankings. They employ in-house staff. They have ordinary, boring titles.
The Internet Is Already Broken
And yeah, everything's bad, everything in your life is marketing, targeted marketing, and if you think you're being bombarded in a way you never were before you started to go online, if you are even of such an age to remember those times, you're right. And it's not just the web. Ed Zitron, in his Substack, talks about how broken the internet is, how beyond the usual complaints about the web, and Google, his personal email has become an endless wall of unwanted communications and outright spam. Companies who assumed a single business transaction to be a lifelong love affair, or at least BFFs.
I know this too well, and you probably do too. I joke, "find someone who loves you as much as the Hilton Dublin Kilmainham loves me." I stayed there for a couple nights back in the summer of 2016. They somehow, improbably, still send me things. And if it's not them, it's any number of other companies. Hi winter! How are you enjoying your Amazon purchase? Can we get a rating? Hi winter! How was your experience with your oil change? Let us know how we did! When I'm at the shop, the front desk workers look at me, explain how I'll be sent a questionnaire. Anything less than 10/10 is failure, they tell me. I know this isn't exaggeration. Any lack of points can be an excuse to discipline, to withhold a raise, to let someone go. This is exhausting. This shouldn't be on me. When did things get this way?
If it seems like things have been getting worse, they have. Google results are awful, and AI will only make them worse; your email, always the target of spammers and huckers, is now full of messages from corporations you've briefly interacted with, hoping for a moment of your rapidly dwindling life. Other people feel this way, too, which is why Amanda Chicago Lewis found herself on a rooftop in Florida, talking to women in designer dresses and men in tailored suits.
How to `un-ruin' the internet: The ultimate guide for SEOs
Her article created something of a stir, and rightfully so, particularly around SEO professionals. At Search Engine Land, Mariya Delano writes a detailed response. It's not great, but it's full of (unwittingly or not) all kinds of SEO signalling techniques: in some twisted sense, it's perfect. I tried to read the whole thing, but I couldn't. The focus wanders. It's far too long. She argues that SEO is part of the traditional role of marketing, "helping the right messages reach the right people." And here's where we diverge: at what point when I went online did I consent to being a vessel for other companies' messages? You see me as a mark, but I don't even want to see you at all.
Bitter, cynical Verge article blames SEO for ruining the internet
I won't say it's never wanted, because people do search for the sorts of things that SEO tries to rank upwards. And here's my own confession: for just over three years, I worked adjacent to all this stuff. Through company politics, one of the best teams I ever worked on got blown up and used to augment the staffing of other teams. I suppose there was a power struggle. We lost. So it goes. And so some of us went to support the company's main applications; others, its peripheral systems. I was placed in the latter group. And after some discussions with my supervisor, I was given a choice: support and update one of our portal applications, or work on our public websites. My web skills were (and still are) beyond rusty, but there's always been at least a little familiarity, a comfort. Maybe it's the memory of when all that used to be fun. Maybe it would be interesting to get my chops back into shape. I chose the latter.
And it wasn't necessarily a bad decision. I got back into HTML and CSS, worked with UX developers to create better, more streamlined pages. The company used a pretty obscure CMS (not even in the top 100) and I learned its fiddly little details. How to keep it fed and watered. When it shat the bed, which it did pretty constantly, I learned I needed to flush the cache, and if that didn't work, schedule an outage, rebuild the elastic search indices. What to do if that failed. Before I left the job, I led the team's effort to rewrite a janky old user-facing web app, from Struts to React. This part was great. Interesting tech, a real problem, a line item for the resume. That app is still there, still works great, minimal changes since I quit. Every now and then I load it and feel proud of what we made.
But fairly often, every few weeks (not counting side conversations on Teams), I'd meet with the brand communications team, and a lot of the time these meetings just left me feeling empty. We'd discuss their requested structural changes to the website. For the customer, we were told, but realistically for better SEO, adding new tags for SEO, more SEO-signaling content. Sometimes this was stuff the user couldn't see. Canonical and language tags. Proper HTTP redirect codes. But sometimes it was user-facing content, like blog posts. Blog posts! You know why you see so many of these on company websites? Because it's a signal to Google that the content is fresh, and should be ranked higher.
Or that's the belief. None of us have looked at Google's code on how it ranks and returns pages. We're all making guesses, repeating accepted wisdom. Why is the web so bad? Because so many people have made it so. Even me.
Anyway, eventually I started to feel something: that what I was doing wasn't creating the strongest website possible for customers who wanted our services, but instead something that signalled well to Google so that it would place us higher. SEO people will tell you that's the same thing, but it's not. Every month we created reports showing various web-focused metrics. We showed that our bounce rate went down. We showed our increasing unique visitor count. Every time I spent any amount of time in the Google Analytics console, I felt like I was dying.
I felt like I was dying because there was a part of me who remembered when my skills were used for something very different: making interesting things, and to hell with where they were placed in a search engine. Delano has a point when she writes about whether SEO professionals are to blame, or the search engines themselves, which expect a set of design principles that enable the behaviour. But I believe Chicago Lewis' arguments: SEO professionals, and their decades of work, their culture, are the reason we are where we are now.
As for me, personally - I eventually left that job, and took another one elsewhere. Happily, I no longer do any front end work. I'm back to what I consider my traditional niche of back-end/integration work, and this time, I'm delighted to say that everything I do serves the public good. For the first time in my working life, I'm happy, really happy. And if what that took was taking a job that actually serves the public, rather than trying to serve things to them, then, well, if other people ever get that opportunity, I humbly recommend they give it a try.
At one point in her long and rambling rebuttal, Delano writes, "I'd take it further: gaming algorithms to make more money online is a problem fundamental to the fabric of the internet itself." Only if you let it be. Only if you don't care about the outcome, and the effect it has on others. The truth is, if you feel unsettled by what's going on, you can walk, like I did, you can find a way to (finally, finally) do right by people; or, you can write a long, woe-is-me article on an SEO website about how the author of the Verge piece was mean to you and your colleagues, how the world doesn't understand you, and anyway, how you're only giving people what they don't know they want.
There are other options for the end user, of course; Bing might be Google's unloved and dumber younger brother, but it works in largely the same way, and while it might serve slightly different results, they don't feel different, if that makes sense. But some search engines, like marginalia, attempt to rank sites differently. Personal, not corporate; interesting or quirky preferred. Marginalia's not perfect, but it's at least different. It gives a different view on to the vast amount of websites available to visit. It's let me find the sorts of sites that have been impossible to find in Google for what feels like a decade or more. And for that, I'm thankful.
Yesterday on cohost I saw a chost that screencapped a tweet from a few years ago: "What everyone wants is to belong to a community but they keep winding up in audiences instead and I think this is the cause of a tremendous amount of suffering right now." I stopped and read it again. Isn't that just the truth. We come online to relieve boredom, or find our people, and a certain type of person takes that as an invitation. We must be here seeking products, because just coincidentally, they've got something interesting to sell. The truth is, I don't really begrudge these people their jobs. I know as well as anyone else that mortgage has to be paid, and bills are getting more expensive. I just wish the proposition wasn't either/or. That they could ply their trade, make the money the need, and that the internet I used to love, the one where I found it so easy to connect with so many people, didn't gradually slip away.
But that's not the case. Here we are, so to speak. And there's a reason I'm publishing this here, in Geminispace, instead of my little corner of the web. Not because it'll find a larger audience, because it won't, but because at the protocol level, at the "describe it in ten seconds to your friends" level, Gemini is both user-centric and SEO nightmare fuel. Users can't be tracked, and there's so few as to be unworth it. And so instead we have a quiet textual, space. The feel of it is reminiscent of going online in 1995, loading up websites in lynx. There's a sense of possibility again, of exploration. It's not perfect, but it's fine. And it's quiet, but it's good.