Curious about the WordPress vs. WP Engine drama? This is a good rundown of the situation.
The researchers warn that this rankings war is likely to get much worse with the advent of AI-generated spam, and that it genuinely threatens the future utility of search engines: "the line between benign content and spam in the form of content and link farms becomes increasingly blurry—a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of generative AI. We conclude that dynamic adversarial spam in the form of low-quality, mass-produced commercial content deserves more attention."I think domain-specific link curation is going to be extremely important very soon. But I've always thought that so who knows?
Everett's post says that "the site will continue to operate as it was before, with all editorial coverage and site features remaining the same, and all historical content accessible." The availability of that historical content was a major concern for many readers—high-end cameras have a long shelf life, and DPReview was an important content repository for people trying to navigate the used camera market. Everett did note that DPReview user accounts had been transferred to Gear Patrol and would be subject to Gear Patrol's terms of service going forward.Oh good, we can have nice things again. I read their gear reviews all the time, glad it's going to survive after all.
"Wirecutter continues to bring in record revenue for the Times, which is sitting on over $1 billion in cash. Yet our members have seen next to no financial benefit from their vital contributions to this success. Times management has offered paltry guaranteed wage increases of only 0.5%, despite soaring inflation and cash flows."I'm a big fan of Wirecutter and I'm sad that I won't be able to use the site this holiday season. It sounds like the people who produce it are not being fairly compensated for a stellar product.
"CAPTCHA images are never joyful vistas of human activity, full of Whitmanesque vigor. No, they’re blurry, anonymous landscapes that possess a positively Soviet anomie."more like post-apocalyptchas, right?
"Third party link-shortening tools can add unnecessary steps to your processes, create accessibility issues, threaten user privacy and undermine user trust – with no benefit to you as communicators."Yes! The risks of using 3rd party URL shorteners outweighs any perceived benefit.
"So today I set out to actually see what it is one agrees to when they accept all."Peeling back the layers on those cookie agreement dialogs helps us learn about how web advertising works (and how massive the industry is).
"Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they’re in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works."Good reminder that web design can fail without accessibility.
"But if folks make more money off of customers when they reduce latency, there has to be some power in increasing latency."This is a hack I can get behind. If you can't slow down the velocity of information on social networks at least you can physically slow down the social networks on the piece of the network you control.