Death to the algorithm.

I loved this essay at The Verge about search engine optimisation killing the web, because it confirmed all my priors. I fucking hate SEO and have always refused to do it. It’s partly why traffic to the Burger declined over the years – although the lemming mad rush away from blogs and onto social media and a couple of years of fitful posting while clinically depressed didn’t help much, either.

But yeah, nah, fucking SEO.

I hates it.

The relentless optimizing of pages, words, paragraphs, photos, and hundreds of other variables has led to a wasteland of capital-C Content that is competing for increasingly dwindling Google Search real estate as generative AI rears its head. You’ve seen it before: the awkward subheadings and text that repeats the same phrases a dozen times, the articles that say nothing but which are sprayed with links that in turn direct you to other meaningless pages. Much of the information we find on the web — and much of what’s produced for the web in the first place — is designed to get Google’s attention.

I’ve reached a place at the back end of my online writing life where I just don’t care anymore, and it totally works for me. If I see something I like, I post it. If I got nothing, then nothing’s what you get.

After watching Twitter and Facebook turn into toxic swamps of algorithmic hate bait, I’m happy to have a little clubhouse where I can just hang out and chill with a very select membership as the mood takes me.