My advice to all OSS developers: if you open source your project, expect it to be abused in all possible ways. Don't open source if you have anxiety over it. It is how the world works, whether we like it or not.<p>I appreciate that you open source your projects for us to study. But TBH, please help yourself first.
In particular, if you license it MIT, and it's useful, expect Amazon to make a fork, not give you the source code, and each tens of millions of dollars from it while you don't get a cent.<p>There's writing code for charity, and then there's <i>this</i>. Charity wasn't meant to include hyper-corporations.
Maybe Stallman had something of a point...
AGPLv3 attempts to solve this problem, by forcing SaaS providers to open-source their modifications.<p><a href="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html</a>
Depends on the needs of the licensor. AGPLv3 solves the problem of other players taking the code, improving it privately, and not sharing those improvements. But AGPLv3 is not a silver bullet for people who write Open Source code and pretend to make a living from it. "Open Source is not a business plan".<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095581">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095581</a>
I don't understand your point? If you write code with an MIT license, this is what you would expect.
So? I am not about to create AWS. I'm glad people can use my free software on their own machines, on rented servers, or hosted by an expert.
A couple years back John Reilly posted on HN "How I ruined my SEO" and I helped him fix it for free. He wrote about the whole thing here: <a href="https://johnnyreilly.com/how-we-fixed-my-seo" rel="nofollow">https://johnnyreilly.com/how-we-fixed-my-seo</a><p>Happy to do the same for you if you want.<p>The quickest win in your case: map all the backlinks the .net site got (happy to pull this for you), then email every publication that linked to it. "Hey, you covered NanoClaw but linked to a fake site, here's the real one." You'd be surprised how many will actually swap the link. That alone could flip things.<p>Beyond that there's some technical SEO stuff on nanoclaw.dev that would help - structured data, schema, signals for search engines and LLMs. Happy to walk you through it.<p>update: ok this is getting more traction than I expected so let me give some practical stuff.<p>1. Google Search Console - did you add and verify nanoclaw.dev there? If not, do it now and submit your sitemap. Basic but critical.<p>2. I checked the fake site and it actually doesn't have that many backlinks, so the situation is more winnable than it looks.<p>3. Your GitHub repo has tons of high quality backlinks which is great. Outreach to those places, tell the story. I'm sure a few will add a link to your actual site. That alone makes you way more resilient to fakers going forward. This is only happening because everything is so new. Here's a list with all the backlinks pointing to your repo:<p><a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bBrYsppQuVrktL1lPfNm5GHa2AcmxPpxSurSAnjSXeg/edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bBrYsppQuVrktL1lPfNm...</a><p>4. Open social profiles for the project - Twitter/X, LinkedIn page if you want. This helps search engines build a knowledge graph around NanoClaw. Then add Organization and sameAs schema markup to nanoclaw.dev connecting all the dots (your site, the GitHub repo, the social profiles). This is how you tell Google "these all belong to the same entity."<p>5. One more thing - you had a chance to link to nanoclaw.dev from this HN thread but you linked to your tweet instead. Totally get it, but a strong link from a front page HN post with all this traffic and engagement would do real work for your site's authority. If it's not crossing any rule (specific use case here so maybe check with the mods haha) drop a comment here with a link to nanoclaw.dev. I don't think anyone here would mind if it will get you few steps closer towards winning that fake site
This is very generous of you!<p>If I was the author, however, I'd still feel like I've been put in a predicament where I need to spend personal agency to fix something that Google has broken.<p>While that may just be a fact of life, my internal injustice-o-meter would be raging. Like, Google is going to take hours of <i>my life</i> because they, with all their billions of capital, can't figure out the canonically-true website when it's RIGHT THERE in the GitHub repository?<p>Ugh. I guess that's just the day we live in. But it makes me rage against the machine on the author's behalf.
I had the exact same thought while reading the above comment, as helpful and generous as it is. Google's entire business model is to help people find things on the internet. They're an insanely well resourced company with all kinds of smart programmers. They have a moral and financial incentive to direct people to canonical sources of information. And STILL it's on this open-source dev to do all the steps outlined just to get the situation corrected?
How many Google search results would point to OP's site?<p>If Google didn't exist, how many Google search results would point to OP's site?
I can’t be the only one blasting killing in the name of in my noise canceling headphones the moment I read your comment..
> This is very generous of you!<p>No it's not, it's a sales pitch that intentionally ignores some of the things pointed out in the article. The author <i>has</i> invested time into proper SEO optimization, legit websites <i>already</i> link to it et cetera, it's all explained in the article.<p>From the perspective of a spammer: They need like 2 million MAU to earn below minimum wage. You're never getting those figures by doing something legit and actually useful to a tiny subset of people. You either need a vague site beyond any point of usefulness to anyone or you need a network of knockoff sites. The reason you can't compete with these shitty SEO spam version of your site is because they <i>already</i> have a network of "authoritative" (in Google's eyes) sites and all they have to do is to link from them to a new one to expand their shitty network.<p>From the perspective of SEO agencies: They can't guarantee results. They can tell you vague, easily-googleable best practices and give you an output of some SEO SaaS that's far too expensive for an individual to purchase. Ahrefs(.com) is the prime example of this, the cheapest paid version costs $129/month. Do you care about SEO <i>that much</i>? No, so you go to these agencies and give them money for <i>them</i> to give you the output of such a tool. But that SaaS <i>also</i> only contains vague and nebulous "things to fix" to follow "best practices" because they <i>also</i> cannot know what drives traffic to your competitor from the outside perspective.<p>My best suggestion would be to start a website from day one. Doesn't matter how good the website is at first, Google favours sites that exist for longer. If you're creating a website <i>after</i> the knock-off version already exist, you might as well give up immediately, it's gonna be near impossible to recover from that.
> No it's not, it's a sales pitch that intentionally ignores some of the things pointed out in the article.<p>Sales pitch or not, someone offering their time to help me with a problem is feels generous to me. To each their own, I suppose.<p>But again, you reinforce my point in your last sentence. Now anytime I want to make any little toy project (because how can anyone know when their toy project will blow up overnight?) I have to make a full blown website just to ensure I don't get SEO-spammed into oblivion?<p>My point still stands. Google is the problem and while we likely can't effectively do anything about it, it's frustrating as hell.
Fantastic advice
great feedback!
So frustrating. Thanks to the commenters who suggest how to win the SEO battle (saving tips...). But is there any viable path to not paying this kind of tax?<p>My possibly naive answer - validated identities, authority over related claims - seems to be blocked by the perceived unreliability of registrars, public or private, or by the problem of having your identity be public (exposing yourself to blackmail).<p>This is not a one-off or even a limited contagion; this psychosis may be a cancer.<p>Psychosis is when unreality replaces reality.<p>It's possible whenever there is a representation of reality.<p>It happens when there is motivated thinking.<p>It persists when it resists any correction by reality.<p>It replicates when people depend on it.<p>Hence: Google, political and commercial media, social media -- all of which make it easy to misrepresent, hard to correct, and impossible to stop.<p>Are there really are no viable alternatives? Who even is motivated to solve it?
I did some experimenting using different search engines and AIs. Here's the results:<p>Google and Brave linked to the official GitHub repo followed by the fake domain. DuckDuckGo and Bing linked to the fake domain first, followed by the official GitHub. Mojeek gave higher ranking to two third party articles, but linked to both the official GitHub and website without fakes. Qwant was the worst, as the official website was the second result amongst multiple fake websites and an unrelated GitHub repo.<p>Then there the AIs. ChatGPT, Google AI mode, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, and Brave Search "Ask" all linked to the official website, and some added the GitHub repo as well. DuckDuckGo Search Assist linked to just the official GitHub. Google AI mode, Gemini and Grok also explicitly warned about the fake websites. Copilot got the official website and GitHub right, but linked to a presumably fake X account as well.<p>Conclusion: Google, Brave and Mojeek win in search. AI is very good and clearly beats search overall. Google AI mode, Gemini and Grok stand out in quality.
I tried AltPower Search and it exhibits the same issue as Google.
I think you might just need to give it more time to index. Nanoclaw.dev has only been available for a week. Then, it's the lower relative reputation of the 'dev' vs. the 'net' domain ...<p>[1]: <a href="https://altpower.app" rel="nofollow">https://altpower.app</a>
[2]: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://nanoclaw.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://nanoclaw...</a>
[3]: <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds" rel="nofollow">https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds</a>
I’m looking at this from a 3rd party of view (definitely not claiming the .net “deserves” to rank higher)<p>1) the .net version has a couple of very high authority links, namely from theregister and thenewstack (both of which have had lots of engagement).<p>I highly doubt it would have ranked without those links.<p>2) its only been a week. Give Google time to understand which pages should rank higher.<p>3) Google is biased towards sites that cover a topic earlier than others.<p>I’ve seen pages that are still top 3 for a particular competitive query years later, simply because they were one of the first to write about it.<p>Suggestions: give it time. Meanwhile I would recommend linking to your website rather than your github everywhere you mention it, to give it a boost
If it saves anyone else the effort: I went to doublecheck the claim that those articles cited the wrong page, and it seems you're correct on The Register, but archive.org's earliest copies of the other two articles don't seem to reference the impostor site. They refer instead to the GitHub.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260301133636/https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/01/nanoclaw_container_openclaw/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260301133636/https://www.there...</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260211162657/https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/nanoclaw-solves-one-of-openclaws-biggest-security-issues-and-its-already" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260211162657/https://venturebe...</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260220201539/https://thenewstack.io/nanoclaw-minimalist-ai-agents/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260220201539/https://thenewsta...</a>
>> I’ve seen pages that are still top 3 for a particular competitive query years later, simply because they were one of the first to write about it.<p>With so many copycats on the internet, first to publish seems like a fairly good indication of the original source. But as we can see here, that's not always true.
> 3) Google is biased towards sites that cover a topic earlier than others.<p>> I’ve seen pages that are still top 3 for a particular competitive query years later, simply because they were one of the first to write about it.<p>Reason why I still always get the Java 8 docs for any search. Annoying.
Most of the problem is the "only been a week" part, likely. Though you're fighting an algorithm that's been patched in inconsistent places for all sorts of weights like "authority" and "quality".<p>Thousands of little weights driven by obscure attributes of the site that you're not really going to figure out by thrashing and changing stuff.
Piggybacking on the <i>Claw</i> hype, surprised when someone piggybacks on you...
It's worse than that. There's a SECOND imitator that I actually stumbled on today while looking something up about nanoclaw - nanoclawS [dot] io - and that one's harvesting email addresses.<p>The obvious risk here is a bait and switch, where one of these sites switches their link to the Github repo to point to a malicious imitator repo instead.<p>One approach would be to go after the sites themselves, not their Google ranking. See if their hosts are willing to take them down. Is there anything you can assert copyright over to hang a DCMA request on? That's hard for an Open Source project, I guess. And the fake sites aren't (yet) doing any actual scamming.<p>Good luck, though!
Losing the SEO battle is a lot like losing money on the stock market. The system you are fighting is incredibly efficient and will never in a trillion years give a single shit about your specific concerns. You can hire lawyers and spend time complaining about it all day on social media. But you'll rarely get a drop of blood out of this stone. The best you can do is to step back, reevaluate your understanding of the market, and adjust your strategy.
Do what Louis Rossman did... just ask Google's AI what you need to change on your site... Apparently that's the secret now.
We had a similar experience — looks like someone used AI to clone our site's design and structure at linuxtoaster.com. The real issue Gavriel is highlighting goes beyond SEO. The cost of creating a convincing copycat site just went to zero. Anyone can feed a successful page to an LLM and get a polished clone in minutes. And for open source projects it's even worse — they can clone your website AND clone your code, have an AI rebrand it, and ship a convincing-looking alternative overnight.
> This isn't an SEO problem. This is a Google problem.<p>I've tested on a few of the big search engines, and nanoclaw.dev is never in the first page.<p>Gemini was also unable to find the .dev, even in "Research Mode." The only way I was able to get a direct link to nanoclaw.dev was with chatgpt, which found it by scraping the GitHub (it also spat out links to a couple of other copies it found from google.)<p>Seems this <i>is</i> a wider SEO issue, one which infiltrates even the technology supposed to replace it.
> Gemini was also unable to find the .dev, even in "Research Mode."<p>Unsurprisingly, right? Gemini just uses the same back end as Google itself, which - according to OP - doesn't list his site on page 1, not page 2 and not page 5.<p>Depending on the prompt, it should have gotten the link from the github, but that's like an indirect hint from a secondary source, it probably ranks the Google index quite highly when it does research.
The link on GitHub to the real site is marked with rel="nofollow". I wonder if it would make sense for GitHub to remove nofollow in some circumstances. Perhaps based on some sort of reputation system or if the site links back to the repo with a <link rel="self" href="..." /> in the header? Presumably that would help the real site rank higher when the repo ranks highly.
I don't see any reason that GitHub should use rel="nofollow"<p>Github only has authority because people put their shit there; if people want to point that back at the "right" website, Github should be helping facilitate that, instead of trying to help Google make their dogshit search index any better.<p>I mean, seriously, doesn't Bing own Github anyway?
Perverse incentives strike again! Websites that allow links in user-generated content are spammed with user-generated spam links to improve SEO of spam sites, which hurts the site's own reputation because most of the links on it are spam. To avoid this, all sites use nofollow.
> When you Google "NanoClaw," a fake website ranks #2 globally, right below the project's GitHub.<p>Unfortunately, the fake website [.net] is also #3 on Kagi, and #1 on Duckduckgo.
On Kagi, the Github is #1 and nanoclaw.dev is #4, but only if you count "Interesting Finds".
On Duckduckgo, the Github is #2 and nanoclaw.dev is nowhere to be found.
> I've done everything you're supposed to do and more.<p>By the sound of it, everything except reporting it? Winning SEO just means appear before them in search results, but the fake page shouldn't just lose the race, it should be taken down.<p>ICANN specifies how to deal with this kind of issue:
<a href="https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/submitting-dns-abuse-complaints-icann-guide-17nov25-en.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/submitting-dns-a...</a>
Comparing the two sites side-by-side (nanoclaw.net, the fake, and nanoclaw.dev, the correct one), there's also the issue that nanoclaw.net is doing a better job of looking like a correct website.<p>The fake site:<p>- includes a copyright statement<p>- includes a bottom sitemap<p>- includes an "author" meta-tag<p>- includes a sameAs to discord "nanoclaw", where the real site references some random string discord server<p>- has a .net instead of a .dev<p>Given all that plus the PageRank feedback loop of the .net having been up longer and enough people having found what they're looking for from it to not trigger Google's low-quality signals, author is fighting an uphill battle here; the squatters know what they're doing.
I don't see that Google cares much about backlinks any more. Seems like it's all about "content" keywords and maybe a little time-on-site. The domain is a huge signal, which is probably where the problem comes from here.<p>Sadly, Google's generally better against all the new AI-generated content farms than other players, so maybe they're still running PageRank somewhere.
People forget that Google is a malware services company. A significant part of their revenue is fake OBS malware and the like.
Copycats are not a new problem. You can be completely open source and have a trademark on the project name.
I saw this some time ago with Bing and OpenCode:<p>"If I search for "opencode GitHub" in Bing, a random fork is returned"<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573286">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573286</a>
> So I built a real website.
That was two weeks ago.<p>Is Google supposed to have drastic updates to its index over 2 weeks?
The whole project is a month old, and two weeks were more than enough for Google to rank the fake site first, so yes?
There is significant first-mover advantage in the index, especially when the public is finding the initial result to be good enough to satisfy their questions.<p>Google doesn't care <i>more</i> about authoritative answers than the public does; the public is one of Google's signals for good-quality results.
Back when they were good at being a web search, yes.
It usually takes one or two days for them to start ranking new pages. They're fast!
Uh? Yes?
Before installing new software, I usually visit its GitHub page or Wikipedia entry first and click through to the official site from there. I just don't trust the 'official' sites that pop up in Google search results. How many of you do the same?
Google is absolutely idiotic sometimes.<p>We (as in the team that helped fork and migrate the PoE1 wiki) setup a new domain for the Path of Exile 2 wiki, which is being hosted by the folks at Grinding Gear Games and linked on the official website and in multiple places on the highly trafficked subreddit.<p>Despite this, Google has decided that the site is not relevant and shouldn't appear anywhere in search results, despite the wiki for the first game appearing everywhere.
I've been annoyed with Google search quality lately and was wondering how the others fared on this specific issue. Turns out, mostly not much better.<p>Bing, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia, Brave all had the github repo and nanoclaw.net (the fake homepage) in the first or second place. Marginalia had fascinating results about biology but only tangentially related Nanoclaw results, not the github repo or either the fake or real homepage.<p>Mojeek was the exception, sort of. It had some random news sites up top, but the github repo in 2nd place and nanoclaw.dev (the real homepage) in the 4th place. The fake nanoclaw.net did not show.<p>Kagi is the only one I couldn't try because apparently I used up my free credits a year back. Can anyone see how they compare?
For me in Canada today, Kagi is showing nanoclaw.wrongtld as the third text link, after two different GitHub repos (why two? I didn't have time to sort that out). I clicked the thing to block the link to the site with the wrong TLD; hopefully other Kagi subscribers will do the same.
Is there an acronym for “AI generated, didn’t read”?
SEO is broken at the moment. With Google Overviews just killing organic SEO, it is becoming less and less relevant, unfortunately.
i think orcasclicer suffers from the same issue. Not really sure why some oss projects struggle with this issue and others don't (notepad++)
Yeah, Google stopped even trying to usefully index most of the web around ‘08 or ‘09 or so. Was super obvious when it happened and it’s been that way ever since. Your GitHub is up there because it’s a blessed website, your personal site isn’t and will struggle mightily to rank even when you search exact, unusual phrases on it, if it’s like most of the rest of the Web on Google these days.<p>Get more traffic (make sure google analytics sees it, IDK but that probably matters because monopoly) and it might help.<p>Most of the other indices aren’t much better. Turns out fighting spam is expensive, easier to just do a combo of boosting really big sites and blessed spammers that use your ad network.
> Turns out fighting spam is expensive, easier to just do a combo of boosting really big sites and blessed spammers that use your ad network.<p>Plus based on the results it’s not entirely clear that only the ad part are ads. Especially around certain topics where money is involved, the Google first page is often showing companies that could profit from traffic
Well, right, a separate problem is that some notable amount of Google's revenue comes from fooling people into thinking that ads are "natural" search results. To include an extortion racket where you have to pay for ad placement for your own exact company and product names so competitors don't get ads-masquerading-as-results placed above you. Plus this is a super-helpful feature to scammers, like it's basically scam enablement trust-laundering as a service. If we had a functioning government and market guardrails the FTC would have been all over them for this many years ago, besides which they'd long ago have been broken up into several separate companies and denied a bunch of the acquisitions they've performed.
I would suggest just using Github Pages for the "official" site, for similar reasons... unless you really need interactive parts that require client-server... in which case you can maybe split between pages and your own domain. Just a thought.
I moved my projects on codeberg and the first results in still the locked github project with the link to the new one.
Wasn't one of the original ideas of NFT was to essentially identify the original creator?
This project was launched very quickly, and may have not had a large budget for extra domains.<p>But for entities with a bit more time, you can prevent this scenario by taking acquiring the .com/.net variant domains before launching.
> I don't want to be playing this game. I want to be writing code, building community, pushing features, fixing bugs.<p>Then just write code, build features, and fix bugs. Nobody is forcing you to fix search engines' problems. If you're not making money off of traffic, then why worry so much about SEO? Just do your thing. If it really bothers you, put a little note on your GitHub warning people about the fake site, and get on with your life.
Oof, this is exactly the nightmare scenario for “repo-first” OSS.<p>The weird bit isn’t that a scraper site exists, it’s that Google can’t do the obvious graph join: query == project name, #1 result is the repo, repo declares Homepage = X, yet Google still boosts an imposter domain. That’s not “SEO”, that’s the ranking system refusing to treat maintainer-declared canonical as a strong signal. Early domain squatters get to “set the default” purely by being first, then they can flip the content later once trust is baked in.<p>People keep saying “tell users to bookmark the real URL” like that scales. Most people will click the second link and assume it’s official. If Google can’t solve this class of problem, their “AI answers” are going to be a bigger mess than blue links ever were.
This <i>is</i> a google problem, but only secondary.<p>The crux of the matter is that there's nothing that protects an open project besides reputation, and nowadays in the digital space it can be cheaply farmed.<p>Laws could help, but they only work when you undertake purposeful actions to be covered by them, like register a trademark, and it's never cheap.<p>Imagine you're in a local band playing shows. It's 3 month old and you have no issued records. A second band tighter with venues takes your name and starts performing under your moniker. You have no money to take that to court and good luck making a case. You can't do anything besides screaming on the web or, don't know, kicking a few butts. You change your name.
You can trademark your open source project, but only the biggest projects do.<p>You used to be able to buy yourname .com, .net, .org and that was a de facto trademark. Now there are gTLDs you can't.
> This isn't an SEO problem. This is a Google problem.<p>Sorry, but this is a SEO problem. The fake site has probably been linked to by a number of high-SEO outlets. What you should do is contact them and tell them to fix the links (to point to your site), which they should be happy to do.
I'm not sure how relevant this is anymore, but when I worked in SEO/Rep Management, when a website was dinged either by google or by hackers, we would usually spin up a new website as an umbrella website for the brand, fix their old site, and create a few smaller websites for the brand in specific niches (like if the brand was a bookseller, we'd have local websites, genre websites, etc.), link to the new websites by the umbrella site, then do a link analysis of the old site, and any news media with high authority, we'd have them update their links to point to the new umbrella website.<p>It was 100% a game of whack-a-mole. And while we were a reputation raiser, we were always combatting against reputation tarnishers. Car dealerships already have a bad reputation to begin with, but they hate eachother more than their customers hate them. They were our bread and butter. Same with tradespeople (plumbing, electrical, hvac, handy(wo)men).
If SEO works, that's a Google problem.
> Sorry, but this is a SEO problem.<p>Google linking to a fake website <i>directly underneath the real project's repository that has a real link to the real website</i> isn't a SEO problem, lol.
> The person running nanoclaw[.]net can put anything they want on that page tomorrow. A crypto scam. A phishing page. Malicious download links. They could fork the GitHub repo, inject malicious code, and link to it from the site that Google is telling thousands of people is legitimate.<p>A lot of handwringing about hypotheticals. The page is up there <i>because</i> it links the official repo. Changing that will quickly tank its search rank.
> I don't want to be playing this game. I want to be writing code<p>I assume the "I" here refers to Claude, who seemingly wrote the entire project AND the linked post.
Sorry Gavriel Cohen, but this Google search placement was promised to the other person thousands of years ago.
- I think I was upset when Google allowed fake ad for VLC to appear high in ranking<p>- I hate that Google returns content farms instead of product web pages<p>- I hate that Google provides a page of 10 useful links, later links are just pure garbage. I think that something in Google engine is profoundly broken<p>- I maintain my own search index, but it requires a lot of effort, and attention. I do insert links if I find them worthy. I think more people should have their personal search indexes. Mine is below. I am quite happy that problems like these do not affect me that much<p><a href="https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database</a>
The more things change the more they stay the same.
Live by bots, die by bots.
Suddenly the pre-Google Yahoo model of curated links is starting to seem relevant again.<p>Curation in general is probably a skill that will become more and more in demand as the Internet fills up with AI slop.
DMCA?
No copyright violation was mentioned here, but it's not a crime to submit a DMCA notice anyway because you don't know the difference between copyright and trademark. If you <i>do</i> know the difference, then it becomes a crime to submit a DMCA notice about something you know a DMCA notice isn't for, so don't read this comment before you submit one.
I'll be honest, I'd take this more seriously if this post didn't read like ChatGPT output. If you won't spend the effort to use your own words why should I stir myself to care?<p>Sorry, I'll put it in hand-crafted ChatGPTese:<p>## The Slop Problem<p>Every post sounds the same. No intelligence. No individuality. Just pure, clean LLM slop. Let's dive in.<p>- <i>Every post has LLM tells</i>. This is key.<p>- <i>Posts get upvoted anyway</i>. Nobody seems to notice or indeed care.<p>- <i>People acclimate to the slop</i>. This isn't just a coincidence. This is a real shift in standards. When people read enough of this, they begin to think it sounds normal.<p>## The Replying Dilemma<p>Should you engage with the content, when there is a real person involved? On the one hand, they put their name on it, and probably the details are drawn from their prompt, so it can be said to fairly represent what they wanted to say. So maybe ragging on their ChatGPT prose is being mean. On the other hand, if nobody ever mentions this, the acclimatization will only get worse as the rising tide of slop overwhelms any other style of writing.<p>## The "Snobbery is good actually" Option<p>Relentlessly bully people for their half-baked LLM copy. Make it your whole personality. Go insane.<p>## The "Giving Up" Solution<p>Learn to stop worrying and love the LLM.
A year ago I would have agreed but lately, when it comes to stuff linked off of HN, it's actually more likely to be clear and readable if it's AI written.
The post is AI generated, the project is AI generated, the "real" website is AI generated, the "fake" website is AI generated.<p>It's slop all the way down.
I'll be honest I really did have slightly higher hopes for computer-touchers when it comes to retaining cognitive authority over machines.<p>Instead it seems like there's a solid core of people who have always wanted to outsource their brains entirely to machines, and have finally got their wish.<p>I'm old enough to remember when we joked about <i>normies</i> who were dumb enough to let computers think for them.
I fell for this yesterday, but for zeroclaw not nanoclaw. I found this website[1] through brave search I think. I was not paying too much attention as I was under the influence, it points to the wrong repo[2] and instructions install from that. I didn't like zeroclaw anyways so I tried to uninstall it and only then realized i'm on a forked repo.<p>[1] <a href="https://zeroclaw.net/" rel="nofollow">https://zeroclaw.net/</a>
[2] <a href="https://github.com/openagen/zeroclaw" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/openagen/zeroclaw</a>
Another comment here but here are all the search engines I looked at:<p>1. DDG
2. Kagi
3. Brave
4. Ecosia
5. Startpage
6. Marginalia
7. Mojeek
8. Yandex.ru<p>from 1-5 all referenced .net before .dev and DDG referenced .net before github , marinalia didn't give me either .net, .dev or gh link but rather docker.com or some other tech articles<p>Mojeek and Yandex.ru DID give me .dev links before .net at the time of writing.<p>I literally opened these two as a joke especially Mojeek not expecting too much But I just know names of lots of search engines so I tried.<p>Mojeek and Yandex.ru have surprised me although I think yandex.ru might have referenced the .dev because of <a href="https://nanoclaw.dev/ru/" rel="nofollow">https://nanoclaw.dev/ru/</a> as it points to this.<p>Mojeek seems interesting now from this observation<p>I also wanted to try swisscows but looks like they have become 100% premium as I do remember being able to search for free but now a popup comes.<p>I also tried baidu (chinese search engine) and it gave results in chinese and firefox translate sort of stuttered and didn't work when I tried to translate, I don't know chinese so pasted it in claude and it doesn't link to either .net or .dev but rather chinese links.<p>Now with all of this observation, I think that we do know one Provider (Mojeek) who won. A lot of these on these lists are actually not independent except Mojeek and brave and probably yandex.ru<p>SO I guess the main takeaway from this could be that Independent search engines can be interesting. They can still be hit or miss but the more independent search engines the merrier given that some might miss but some will also hit.<p>My comment definitely feels like a good reputation bonus for mojeek. Well anything for more independent search engines imo. I looked at their about me and it seems that they are a single person (Marc Smith). Fascinating stuff<p>I know marginalia_nu is on hn so maybe marginalia and mojeek can share some index together. Anyways this was a fun exciting experiment to do. I hope the community tries out other search engines if I may have missed any and share insights if a particular search engine gives interesting results.
It’s worse. I wrote about this a couple weeks ago [1]. With AI responses and Google pulling results from different sources, you could potentially hijack other brands with your own fake content (ie: phone number).<p>1: <a href="https://codeinput.com/blog/google-seo" rel="nofollow">https://codeinput.com/blog/google-seo</a>
Duckduckgo actually shows nanoclaw.net as the first result and the github page as second.<p>Another point but DDG's AI feature actually references Nanoclaw.net as a source.<p>Damn I booted up Orion (Kagi) and even Kagi shows nanoclaw.net as the third result after the github page with qwibitai and another github page with your (previous?) github username ie gavrielc which when clicked on also results to the same github page.<p>There is an interesting find page in kagi which references the website but it still shows nanoclaw.net page earlier and the nanoclaw.dev interesting find shows the .dev domain barely that in first time I didn't even notice it.<p>I expected it better from DDG/Kagi to be honest. I also tried brave and it had the same issue. Brave even is its own independent index and even that struggles with.<p>Let's hope that this can quickly get patched though. Also a good reminder to people to prefer opening up github links than websites as I must admit that even as a tech-savvy person I could've fallen for nanoclaw.net link as well given its second in like all search engines.
We can fix this quickly at DuckDuckGo, and we will for organics. I suspect part of the problem is I am seeing a TLS issue with the nanoclaw.dev site.
Can you please share the details with me so I can fix?
gavriel@qwibit.ai or <a href="https://x.com/Gavriel_Cohen" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/Gavriel_Cohen</a>
Awesome! I am a big fan of DDG. I am happy I could help you guys. Another minor tidbit but please also remove DDG AI summary about nanoclaw referencing the .net if you do take some action about it.<p>I have also written a more detailed comparison comparing all search providers that I could find, perhaps it might be of interest to ya but only Mojeek/(yandex.ru with the nanoclaw.dev/ru) were able to reference it earlier than .net<p>I have been an happy user of DDG for many time. I trust DDG significantly more than Google and I am happy that you guys could read such feedback!<p>Have a nice day DDG team!
So did the Startpage for me! My faith is both domain being super new, it will resolve itself in weeks/month time.
>We trust Google to surface reliable information about elections. Vaccines. Medical conditions. Financial decisions. And they can't get this right?<p>Actually I don't trust Google and I don't expect it to surface reliable information. I expect it to surface information and I will dig through it and judge for myself whether it is reliable or not.
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This is an AI bot. I can tell from seeing many AI talk in my lifetime.
@dang, send it back to hell please.
OP is playing the wrong game. They should have filed a trademark for the name and start sending legal letters to the copycat.<p>This is why open source projects like Firefox hold trademarks near and dear.
> Google's discoverability problem isn't just an SEO issue; it's reshaping how builders have to think about distribution from day one.<p>bro.
Steve Jobs famously never allowed free meals at Apple.<p>Humans are psychologically incapable of assigning respect to things that are free; across the board - not donating to open-source, maxing out every dollar of food stamps, refusing to pay a dollar for an app if it has a free tier, even companies like AWS ripping off open source without any qualms. If you got an offer for a free relationship no strings attached, would you take it seriously? If someone on a street corner has artwork for $5 or $500, it could be the same piece of art, but which one gets more attention on first glance?<p>If you want your work to be respected, do not make it open source. Your odds are slightly better at succeeding at acting. Remember that 97% of public GitHub repos have zero external users.
Food stamps?? This is a ghoulish position, morally, financially, and as a matter of policy.<p>We live in the richest country on planet earth and we <i>eliminated child hunger</i> here during COVID only to <i>roll it back</i>.<p>It's not even 1.5% of the budget currently. Compare this to our military adventurism budget.<p>Every $1 invested in SNAP <i>generates $1.80 in economic activity</i>, right now.<p>Children need food to grow up and be 'productive', even if you don't see value in human life and are captial-maxxing; This is an important program for <i>creating excess productivity</i>. The same is true of well funded public schools. A well-fed and educated populous is optimal by every public metric.<p>I doubt you are an actual member of the bourgeoisie, so I must conclude you just enjoy a starving and undereducated mass of parents and children you look down upon for their poor moral character?<p>Adults need food to be 'productive' as well. Adults that are not afraid that they are going to starve commit fewer crimes.<p>You want to 'save' some money? Eliminate means testing entirely and give every American have a baseline EBT card food budget per person in the household. No special virtuous food categories to make sure the poor know they are being watched. Just a monthly cash infusion spendable at all grocers.<p>This way, walmart and other mega-corps won't be able to scam the government by creating positions that force their workers onto these means tested programs and lock them there.
Not even remotely related to what the parent comment said.
You are arguing against a different argument than your parent. He implied that people using food stamps do not respect the effort it took to provide the food. You seem to be arguing whether food stamps are profitable.<p>Your implication that people when not given free food will starve and that your parent commenter wants people to starve is clear manipulation.
> I doubt you are an actual member of the bourgeoisie<p>I wouldn't be so sure of that on HN. (Also noting you're using the Marxist definition rather than the default dictionary definition, which is "middle class".)<p>A well-paid tech employee with a non-trivial amount of company stock is, strictly speaking, an "owner of the means of production". Even if you want to quibble with that, their interests are certainly well-aligned with that group - to the point that you generally won't hear a peep out of them as things get more and more dystopian, because of what Upton Sinclair observed, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."<p>> I must conclude you just enjoy a starving and undereducated mass of parents and children you look down upon for their poor moral character?<p>It's much simpler than that. It's pure, unadulterated "I got mine and you ain't touchin' it". There's no real thinking that goes beyond that purely selfish position. The consequences aren't seriously considered, they're just taken as part of the natural order. Any causal connection is denied, rationalized by accusations of laziness, inferiority, etc.
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Seems you have good intention at heart and clearly care about people, and from my observation have some emotional processing and clearing to do to avoid sounding like you are lashing out at whoever internet stranger could fit your mold of comfort to emotionally dump on.<p>Have you considered channeling that energy into advocacy or volunteerism? I feel you'd like that.
> <i>Humans are psychologically incapable of assigning respect to things that are free</i><p>I know a few people who had to make use of food banks and were <i>grateful at the time</i> for the donations of others. They now try to donate what they can as payback.
At one startup there was unlimited free candy bars. We (devs) had to have a meeting with the office manager and tell them to remove them. We had zero self control.
It took me a long time to realise that people value things by how much they pay for them, not by how much they cost to produce. It doesn't matter if that's software, a pair of trousers or a meal at a restaurant.<p>This extends into the world of work as well. Employers that don't pay well tend to treat their employees poorly.
I think that's backwards. If something is expensive those who don't value it won't pay and thus won't have. It's not that paying results in respect but rather a straightforward case of sample bias.
I am part of Lowendtalk community where hosting providers sometimes gives deals even better than hetzner/ovh etc. who are even impacted even more by the ram crisis but they are trying their best imo to not have prices be risen across the board. Sort of eating the 5x costs of ram.<p>The entitlement is truly real at times. I think that sometimes I can be part of that entitlement too but I think I try to be respectful usually and say my concerns if I have any.<p>This sort of becomes a circular because VPS at the very least do indicate support and good quality/atleast decent quality hardware. A server too cheap and too overprovisioned with steal factor (Like Contabo) is universally hated by people. But these are the same people who will take deals if they are the cheapest across the board (myself included at times, I have got an idle netcup vps for a few months for 10$ simply out of curiosity but I do think that's 10$ worth spent to get the idea of a public facing ipv4 but yea)<p>So a lot of summer hosts/ deadpools (Scam-type) take on this opportunity and what they do is rent hardware for a month or year from other providers with large specs and split it into small chunks and give yearly, triannually, lifetime deals which can be too good to be true.<p>Turns out that they are, as usually sme sort of scam type stuff happens after a year or two or three.<p>This also makes it hard for new providers to try to prove their worth at times too if they are legit all within a market which is very price competitive.
I don't think it was respect, as much as I respect what he did with Apple and tech in general. Every single story about money with Steve Jobs revolves around him refusing to give up any of it. He even scammed Steve Wozniak by lying to him how much they were being paid, to which Steve said he would have gladly given him money if he needed money. I don't think Steve needed it, he was like Mr. Krabs from Spongebob. Even his biological daughter, he refused to leave her a penny or acknowledge that she was his daughter, even after a court ordered DNA test proved she was his daughter. He paid the minimal in child support.<p>For Steve Jobs it was not about respect or value, that's the lie. It was about greed.
Pretty much matches my experience. Trying to sell something on Craig's list or whatever is pretty hit-or-miss, whether it's $5 or $500. But make it free, and people will bang down your door to try to get it. It could be a shoebox full of used soy sauce packets and you'll get people for days asking if it's still available.
The parent comment is downvoted into oblivion, but I read it as not necessarily saying "this is the way to do it" but rather "this is the harsh reality of rampant capitalist society" that we built around ourselves (we all carry responsibility here), where only money speaks and people "respect" full wallets coughing up the dough. I spent most my time in FOSS realms the past decade, and many people who are even participants in free software development themself often do not notice where and how value is extracted, and how they indirectly or directly play a role in that.<p>As for value extraction, have a look at this article and weep: <a href="https://www.heise.de/en/news/Harvard-study-Open-source-has-an-economic-value-of-8-8-trillion-dollars-10322643.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.heise.de/en/news/Harvard-study-Open-source-has-a...</a><p>OTOH this also shows the huge potential FOSS has, if it manages to only slightly shift that balance in their favor.
Free as in beer? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre</a><p>Its weird to be all evo psych about this either way IMO, free as in gratis has only been situationaly possible at all for very short time of human history. All armchair philosophy needs to take it into account! As soon as you recognize that, we're forced to question such pat appeals to nature or what not, and drawn necessarily to consider how systems make humans one way or another.<p>Put another way, this position is incredibly fatalistic, as well as kinda sad and lonely to my ears.
Oh shit... Ok... Um... Beej's Guide to Network Programming is now $500! Respect me!
> Humans are psychologically incapable of assigning respect to things that are free<p>Citation needed. You're describing a particular tendency, not some absolute property of human psychology. It's also a behavior that's greatly affected by social construction. In the US, the attitude you're describing is much more prevalent than in some other countries, because of cultural biases.