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Can/should Tildes pull out of search engine results?
The other thread about potential spam on the site got me thinking, can/should Tildes hide itself from Google and other search engines (aside from just the main page) to avoid the tentacles of SEO from infiltrating the site? I'm not sure how feasible that is, but I know reddit has the option to prevent your profile from getting indexed by search engines so perhaps that could be applied to the site as a whole.
Tildes isn’t a private forum and I don’t think we should pretend that it is. Anyone could be reading your posts by joining Tildes using an alias. We give out invites pretty freely to strangers, and technically most of us are strangers to each other.
So I think anyone serious about privacy should post under an alias, change usernames every so often, but still be reluctant to post anything possibly identifying. There is somewhat of a chilling effect to that, but I prefer to think of it as being prudent.
And then if you’re taking those precautions anyway, why not allow the strangers who use search engines to benefit from what you write? That’s kind of the point of publishing things openly.
I switch accounts every year.
The major downside to a small community like this, is that even though I remember you, you don't know who I am.
Also, I believe the primary focus of OP thread is spam, not privacy (that was a different thread.)
What do you do with the old accounts? Do you remember the password for all of them? Just curious
Nothing.
Occasionally I deliberately post under the old account.
Once or twice, I accidentally posted under an old account.
Sometimes I go back, trying to remember that one really amazingly insightful thing that was said.
When Reddit did the IPO, I did scour all my accounts to see if any met the threshold individually.
If Deimos ever implements his system of trust, I might be in a small, minor quandary.
Mostly I do nothing. Anything else defeats the point of switching accounts.
Well now I'm just going to assume anyone wearing pants (or not) is you.
I just did this. I remember you but you don't remember me. Shoe's on the other foot now, ha!
Ahhhh yes, it will be a cold day in the arctic before I figure this one out ;)
Tildes actually has restrictions in place related to that already. Even though it doesn't use rel="nofollow" on anything (which is all that reddit does to "protect" users profiles, AFAIK), logged out users (and so crawlers too) viewing this site can only see a small portion of the first page of everyone's user profile. Just view your own profile page in private browsing to see how restricted it is. And for reasonably active users, that restriction doesn't allow a whole lot to be indexed by crawlers.
As for taking Tildes off search engine results entirely though, I would personally vote no. Tildes internal search is pretty decent, but it's still limited in what it can do (e.g. it can't get results from comments or topic text, search by domains/URL, etc), and being able to find older posts here via search engines is incredibly useful.
p.s. Deimos also already does a damn good job of keeping SEO boosting crap and SPAM off the site, IMO. He created AutoModerator and used to be reddit's "anti-evil" engineer, so has a fair amount of experience handling that sort of thing, and I am not too worried about it taking over the site... especially since it's invite only, which makes bans a lot more potent. ;)
Pardon my technical ignorance, but would "rel=nofollow", if applied to a user name, mean that if I e.g., did a Tildes-site specific search of a username on google, there'd be no results?
I know tildes limits user profile info/comment history when viewing as logged out, but the comment history aspect is easily bypassed.
No, there would still be plenty of results... just not directly from the user page itself. Not all major search engines even respect nofollow though, and shadier search engine crawlers and data collection scrapers aren't deterred by it at all. IIRC, that is one of the reasons Deimos doesn't use nofollow, since it gives people an entirely false sense of security/privacy.
Technically, Tildes absolutely could, but I don't think it should. While word of mouth works fairly well, I also do believe that organic discovery through search engines is a good thing. Because Tildes isn't a private community, it has a small restriction on participation, but that is easy enough to overcome.
No. I don't think search engines should be blocked in any way. What good does it do if people voice constructive arguments with regards to a variety of topics, but no one randomly researching that topic outside of tildes can find them. Tildes is already invite only and maintains an invite tree to regulate spam. I believe that's enough. The platform itself is and should be public by design. Private/Restricted information that should not be accessible to everyone should not be posted here in the first place.
Reddit just recently struck a deal with google, resulting in all other search engines effectively no longer being able/allowed to scrape the platform. I remember the good old days when you could google on a searchengine of your choice, append inurl:reddir.com to it, and find active solution oriented threads foe most issues. It's sad those days are over, and reddit has become a arbitrarily restricted mess full of fluffy content without substance.
Let's not go down the path of creating an isolated tildes filter bubble that can't even be found from the outside world without insider knowledge. I for one want public posts to be as easily accessible for everyone. If all constructive discussions were hidden in some manner, how would anyone find anything anymore. That's not how freedom of information works.
Tildes is invite only.
That it is an automatic throttle on SEO spam.
The problem with invite only, is user growth.
So Tildes needs to appear outside of Tildes to drive some user growth.
There were plans to enable a trust mechanism to open up user growth, but I think those are on hold for now.
I don't see any benefit to doing so unless your goal is to prevent growth or sustain some kind of echo chamber on the site.
I'm all for tildes gradually growing and exploring new ways of running a forum effectively without falling into the pitfalls of reddit.