> Will old domains resell for premiums like low-background-radiation steel?

This has been a thing for a long time in domain name resale for speculation or link farming or similar, domains that are aged with "backlinks" sell for more money.

https://www.google.com/search?&q=domain+resale+backlinks

Private blog networks is another term in that side of the world. They're explicitly designed to look legit even to a human but give link juice to the spam world (which also look legit to a human). And the HN crowd say "I can spot an AI website a mile away!!!". Well cool, and good for you, but many people cannot. In fact, if you can, they are glad you are so smart and are leaving. Why? Because you wont convert.

The targets in the spam world (email and seo) that want to make money want the low hanging fruit. They want uneducated people to visit the site. I remember when google was still young, these same people wanted visitors from AOL. Why? lower traffic and much higher conversion. What kind of person uses AOL when google is available? An uneducated one and a new one to the internet. Or an older person who is likely to fall for a scheme.

I suspect more and more visitors coming from google will be seen this way in the age of AI and social media searching. Easy targets. Whether it's true or not is debatable (maybe people just want to read a real webpage and have AI burnout). Anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk.

I own a single English language dictionary word .net domain that is a common word related to lawsuits/legal activity and have been offered money to sell it. If I sell it, it will almost certainly become the front page of somebody's CRM lead generator for personal injury lawyers (or a blogspam site driving traffic to same through affiliate links).

People who work in actual infrastructure building tech may not know or have any reason to pay attentino to how many shady "affiliate" networks there are in existence for click traffic.

I dont know if I would discredit those folks as not knowing "actual infrastructure". The lengths I saw some folks go to get unique class C ip ranges and maintain automation is pretty impressive.

> Private blog networks is another term in that side of the world. They're explicitly designed to look legit even to a human but give link juice to the spam world (which also look legit to a human). And the HN crowd say "I can spot an AI website a mile away!!!". Well cool, and good for you, but many people cannot. In fact, if you can, they are glad you are so smart and are leaving. Why? Because you wont convert.

PBNs are designed to look legit to a Google manual review, to remain indexed, to retain whatever value Google gave to the previous legit incarnation of the site. (The key marketplace for sourcing candidate PBN websites are expired domains that recently had strong search engine rankings)

It's a pure organic SEO play, not a human conversion play. The idea is that the PBN site has a retained link value. And that link value is used to (directly or indirectly) link to a site that is the money site, to boost the search rankings of that money site.

The money site isn't going to be an AI-slop site, it's going to be the polished well-optimised, well-performing as it can be. The PBNs that give the money site credence, that varies based on how much work the money-site owner is willing to spend on the network. The lower end is not even AI-slop, but a static website programmatically generated by content spinning and synonym replacement, where the content is scraped from other sites or perhaps even archive.org snapshots of long dead sites.

If enough independent-looking, diverse-seeming, legit-looking sites are linking to a commercial site, that suggests an element of trust and respectability. That's what PBN creators rely on, creating the appearance of authoritativeness good enough to fool/coerce Google into ranking the money site higher.

IP addresses too. Everyone who trades IP blocks pays a premium for ones that haven't been used for spamming in a long time, so they can be the first in a long time to use them for spamming.

It wouldn't surprise me. It seems like a mirror of the social media move from social graphs to recommendation engines. You are either producer or consumer and never shall consumer be promoted organically.

Search used to feel more like infrastructure: put something useful on the web, link to it, and eventually people could find it

What if I want to spend my time discussing things that are not represented in my geographical region?

Start a club in your geographical region.

This response sounds like "let them eat cake". You realize a lot of people on the internet (even here on HN) are in the developing world and, whether due to lack of means or weak passports, can't necessarily travel to where the things that interest them can be found locally?

I also find IRL social interactions also want pacing to some degree. But I don't know, I find my brain is sort of wired for these sorts of novel, pseudonymous interactions from a young age.

Yeah I get that. But treat them like candy - it's okay to eat a small dessert after lunch, it's okay to eat entire bucket of ice cream once in a while, but you know, your main diet needs to be quality stuff.

Words of wisdom to heed. Thank you, user anal_reactor :‑D

Stay open for more nuggets of wisdom!

> Have the internet cards been handed out now, and are we in the end-game?

The big companies are trying to corral and kill everybody else, yes.

That's not some "end-game", though. It's just powerful anti-social entities doing their thing while society refuses to punish them.

The really perverse bit is that this rewards exactly the kind of consolidation Google's anti-spam changes are presumably meant to fight

That or Google is getting so unusable even Discord is a better search engine.

I realize that this is a tangent but one of the more sad developments of recent developments as an advocate for open knowledge is how much of it is trapped on servers like discord that will never be indexed by any search engine.

There isn’t even an ability to turn on a feature to have discord chats indexed or anything. I realize it’s not only discord but it’s illustrative of what I perceive as an issue

It's no worse than how it used to be trapped in IRC greybeards and the solution, whatever it is, is presumably the same.

> Will old domains resell for premiums like low-background-radiation steel?

See also: any number of user-contributed sites that were bought by big players and basically parked. Does anyone even go to mp3.com for any real reason other than to see if anything has been done with it since the original was forced offline? I suspect they'll eventually unload it to someone who forks over enough money.

Not the end, just google bleeding itself out as a search engine while LLMs take over. Chatgpt often links me random, actually decent sites that I wouldn't have gotten from a simple google search on first page, because it would've been exclusively seo slop

ChapGPT (and all other hosted L To me) still use a search engine behind the scenes whenever you ask a question. Often, it uses those seo slop sites as primary sources when formulating an answer. Which is why, even though hallucinations are now somewhat rare these days, you _still_ should independently verify their output for anything important.