I don't know if I'd go _that_ far. There are a lot of great books out there.

But I'm pretty sure mine is the greatest that you can't pay money for. ;)

Whats K&R?

I've definitely considered that. (I'm well-aware of my nickname's connotations, and I just don't care. :) )

But they index everything else on my site and don't prude out over that...

Actually outright porn is indexed you know or so I hear.

That's pretty obscure slang, I'm American and have never heard it.

Entire career? That's pretty high praise... Well, if you're ever in Bend, OR drop me a DM and I'll start to collect. :)

I have to add "beej" to the search, and then it hits my C Library Reference Guide. But the C Tutorial Guide is nowhere to be found. :(

Some rando backlink checker says it's about 1300.

> i assume you have >0 backlinks to the site?

I always wondered about this. What exactly is a backlink, and why should I need one?

Nowadays, when I search for things, the results are often clearly pages that have come from a program scrapping sites and then merging them into one page. You can tell because the pages are not really coherent and quickly start to repeat themselves. I assume they are getting money through ads on the pages, though I never actually see the ads because of my blockers. I wish there was a button in the browser that I could click to report the page as spam to all search engines.

> It feels like the Internet is a more hostile place than ever for small-time websites. You get squeezed from below by wily criminals, and crushed from above by careless megacorps who want to filter out anything that doesn't make them money.

The problem is that the two work hand-in-hand, thanks to the advertising driven search model, and the search engines owning the main advertising platforms.

It should be easy for search engines to identify an original site from the SEO spammer rip-offs - the original site is going to have no adverts (or certainly fewer) while the SEO spammer copies are going to be covered in adverts. The problem is that the search engines have no incentive to do so, in fact if anything they have the incentive to send people to the sites with more adverts.

And of course the whole problem has been created by the search engines in the first place - there would be no point in SEO spammers making advert-laden ripoff sites if it wasn't to rake in advertising revenue.

No more hostile than real world, we are just finding out it is a reflection of our world, of course the difference being the global interconnectedness which magnifies the celebrities but also the crooks.

> What should you do when another site copies your content like this then?

Have we gotten to the point where websites (and their content) need to be verified like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok do for personal accounts?

If so, will search engines be the ones verifying - using this as a new revenue scheme (with the dangers inherent in this... ie; pay to be listed or ranked higher)?

Various things from addressing the problem directly if possible (block the IP address range they use to scrape your content with, insert JavaScript to strip the content client-side depending on the domain it's being served from), to changing their search engine behavior (canonical meta tags, contact the search engine to let them know, build up links on the web to make your site higher ranked).

The more sophisticated and popular the copycat site is (scraping from a distributed network, stripping most HTML tags, etc.), the harder it becomes, and the only thing is to contact the search and hope they can manually mark your domain as the authoritative one. Your success may vary according to your popularity/importance.

You send a DMCA.

This is exactly a perfect use case for a blockchain. In fact if people are interested we should create a POC.

Maybe there is a retrocommission program to which they are affiliated?

When you first hear a term used, I think it's natural for people just try to figure out what it means in context without looking up the official definition (I've caught myself doing this subconsciously before).

Imo a logical interpretation of "shadow ban" would be when you are banned but they didn't tell you they banned you, and regular "ban" is when they tell you you were banned. It makes enough sense that people don't think they need to look it up to confirm.

edit: funny enough, I did double-check the wikipedia page to make sure my understanding was correct, but upon reading further it does acknowledge the expanding of the definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning

Elon wants to redefine the term as well but for the purpose of a coordinated witch hunt. People like using shadow ban because it sounds more malicious vs. content that is no longer actively promoted by a company. It's hard to claim you're a victim if the reason is you're just not that interesting or popular.

Yes, its called Algorithmic Supression.

That doesn't sound as cool and victimey though.

"Automatically downranked/downweighted/penalized" are terms I've heard.

I think unlike in the case here, (soft) shadow banning would be appropriate to describe it, even though not 100% technical correct.

I believe Musk when condemning old twitter for doing it and deboosting when he promises new Twitter will do it.

That would just be a ban. You dont need to be told you are banned.

I think a good test of whether this application of the term makes any sense is: Could any search engine ban ever not be a shadow ban? We already have a term: ban. Let's just use that one and stop conflating things and being unnecessary imprecise and incendiary. It helps certain parties' (edit plural possessive) agenda but does not help us clearly communicate.

If it was a shadow ban he would see his site when he searched but we wouldn't. This is definitely not that.

Check with Stanford first, “ghost” might be offensive to the living impaired. =P

Outdexed, clearly.

A bunch of sites popped up hosting it loaded with SEO garbage and ads. I’d licensed it MIT so while they certainly can, it sure doesn’t feel nice.

He says in the link it’s specifically the C guide, the rest of the website is fine. Though... yeah, DDG queries like “beej c guide strlen” give reasonable results for me, if with an unjustifiably high-ranked position for the mirror at http://docs.hfbk.net/beej.us. Bing ones only include the mirror and the other guides (and a Scribd-hosted PDF copy, of all things, as the first result below a huge navigation card referring to https://beej.us/guides but without the C guide among the links).