I write SEO drivel for a living. I’m fairly good at it, even if the products I shill for are useless to 90% of the population… and that’s the problem. There was a time when I was able to not think too much about it, even if I was a little uncomfortable with the fact that my “job” basically shouldn’t exist and contributes to the eshittification of the internet. I was just happy to finally be able to learn a living after being unemployed for so long.
But I can’t ignore it anymore. The articles get harder and harder to write, the research is boring and pointless, and search engines aren’t exactly helpful either on account of said eshittification, which I’m contributing to. And that’s on top of all the extra requirements the clients have.
But the thing that makes it the hardest to keep going is that I can’t in good conscience market things to people, however indirectly, unless I am absolutely sure the product will help them or I can personally vouch for the usefulness of the product. Which I obviously can’t because I’ve never tried any of the products I’m writing to shill for. And I think it’s deceptive, which doesn’t sit right with me.
CW: mental health stuff, Calvinist brainworms
I used to be able to kinda just dissociate and not think about it too much. Just focus on the money, you know? As long as I could earn my own way and not have to rely on others just to get by, be less of a burden to others. Also feel like a proper adult for once. Yeah, I know everyone else is winging it, but when you’ve never been independent, it’s hard not to feel like there’s something wrong with you (even though that in itself is a capitalist brainworm and all that).
I also hate that I’m contributing to the selling of more useless shit that nobody actually needs. Like, we’re wasting tons of water to power some AI 
are convinced is the next coming of Jesus? 
I think I’m going to quit this line of work. I just can’t do it anymore. Apparently, some people can make a butt load of money writing this drivel but I personally have never made all that much. And honestly, I don’t even think the money would help at this point. But with my lack of skills and social anxiety, I’m not really sure what other jobs I can do.
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I am also someone who had to leave the SEO world because it is uniquely soul-damaging.
If it helps to drive you to action: This is almost certainly a dead-end line of work. The people who make money off this stuff aren’t the ones doing the writing, and SEO chum is one of the most attractive things for them to automate with LLMs. Even third-party providers who are doing this stuff for clients now are going to find it hard when companies start bringing this in-house or moving to CRM/CMS platforms that have it built-in.
Not that there’s a whole lot of great jobs out there right now, of course… but you can keep this one while you shop around?
Good luck; I’m pulling for you
It really is uniquely soul-damaging. And you’re right - funnily enough, one agency I used to work with encouraged the use of LLMs, and I’ve been seeing some high-ranking articles that read like ChatGPT wrote them. Thanks the encouragement, hopefully I won’t have to stick with it for much longer
From now until you quit you have to add “Help I’m trapped in a SEO factory” somewhere halfway down all your articles
I used to work as a web developer for a retail chain that specialized in African blood diamonds and gaudy shit that was destined for the Cash 4 Gold heap pretty much the second it left the factory. My predecessor had set up one o’ them fancy, new-fangled interwebs “e”-“commerce” webzones and immediately quit the company upon realizing that he was in over his head and couldn’t do administration duties on a LAMP server and fix all of the weird site content issues that he’d introduced by hacking a shitty third-party Magento theme to pieces.
Cut to about six months later when I came on board and was going through trying to review some of the site’s performance and search relevance issues. Somewhere along the line, I found that one of the many, many extensions that Dipshit had installed included a dynamic product catalog filter set that was not only the #1 cause of our ongoing site performance issues by that point, but also returned canonical links in the sitemap generator, and Google had been crawling all of these dynamically-generated result sets based on every single product attribute in the system.
The punch line: many of these attributes returned empty result sets, and the default landing page for an empty result set had a big fucking
<h1>WOOPS!</h1>at the top of the page. For several years, if you searched “WOOPS” on Google, that company’s e-commerce site was #1.TL;DR: Semantic SEO is 10,000% bullshit.
Edit: I also want to include that Dipshit had “VOTE RON PAUL” bullshit all over his LinkedIn profile. During Obama’s second term.
Dipshit had “VOTE RON PAUL” bullshit all over his LinkedIn profile
Why am I not surprised
You should use your powers for good by getting hexbear to the top of all search results.
Soon,
will rank for the VERY lucrative keywords of tankie, ppb, and beanis. If anyone has some beanis or beanis-related products they wanna sell, now’s the time 
Maybe you can help the lazy people who stumbled onto this post. What is SEO?
Search engine optimisation - basically getting web pages to rank higher on search engines, especially Google
As someone that just wants to make nice looking websites, SEO is bullshit.
My personal business site is third or fourth result on Google if I search my site’s exact name.
Yep, looking forward to it no longer existing (SEO, not your website)
It’s almost impossible to pick a word, any word, that you might want to look up for definition purposes without directly slapping “DICTIONARY” down first, or else you’re likely to get several pages of bazinga startups using that word, and even the “DICTIONARY” entry may shove you into some bazinga shit anyway.
I switched to DDG years ago to get rid of that shit and now it happens there too.
#hexbear #socialist #communist #hex #bear #beanis #struggle session #struggle #session #outdoor cat #real #me_irl
did I miss anything?
I can definitely identify with the meaningless job that one might feel is doing more harm than good for society. I suspect this can be partially attributed to the mentality of ‘find a job, any job is better than being unemployed’ -I’m still working through the solution myself but I’m inclined towards thinking that this could be a motivator towards finding work that contributes towards the betterment of society. Now, if only I could find some work like that, that actually contributes to a stronger sense of security like that described by Maslow’s hierarchy.
Now, if only I could find some work like that, that actually contributes to a stronger sense of security like that described by Maslow’s hierarchy.
Same here. I hope you find it too. Though in this capitalist hellscape, there’s a better chance of finding a needle in a haystack
As much as it sucks I am glad whatever money can be extracted this way is going to a comrade instead of some random lib.
Thanks, that means a lot
Do you work freelance for some sort of online compant? I was doing some remote freelance gig work for AI at places like Outliner and Alignerr, but that’s dried up and I’m getting scared about rent.
Wanna tag me in for a bit?
DM’d you
I wasn’t in quite the same field, but I dealt with a lot of the same shit you’re describing. I quit last year and are trying to get a childcare degree (pedagogy it’s called here, not sure if that translates). Thinking it will be a line of work where I get out, do something relatively meaningful for someone else, even if it is hopelessly undervalued and paid here. But with social anxiety, I don’t know if that’s an option, depends how you feel around kids, I guess.
Hope it goes well for you! Sucks that it pays so little, but it definitely sounds more (spiritually/morally?) rewarding than what you were doing before. I’m not great with kids so it’s not gonna work out for me
Thanks a lot, really hope you find something else (or a different way to do it that is less crushing). I don’t know anything about your background, location, safety net etc. so it would be irresponsible/unserious to say “just quit”, but all I can say is that it felt really good to walk out, even knowing I was walking into some uncertainty (had no idea what I wanted to do instead at the time). Felt like something got lifted off my shoulders.
Right now I’m taking a break to see if it’ll help, but I highly doubt I’ll want to go back after it’s over. It feels like something got lifted off my shoulders too. Thanks for sharing, comrade - I’m glad the uncertainty didn’t last and it gives me hope that mine won’t, either.
