1mo ago

4 different "blogs" with the same content?

As I was looking for whole grain ramen options, I kept running across these comparison pages that looked suspiciously similar. Are any of these folks real? How would I tell? Not sure what to make of the sorority one.

one -two -three -four

I hate that, in addition to endless Amazon results, we have to deal with these (AI?) results, too.

11 comments

Definitely fake, imo. They don't pass the sniff test for me.
The design is identical on all four sites, with the exception of the logo. Now, this in and of itself isn't a smoking gun: the design appears to be the WordPress default design from 2024. But it was the first thing I noticed, and with everything else...
The subjects are all the same but the copy is conspicuously different--if you and I were to each write an article about the same ramen, we wouldn't write the same article, but we would probably come up with a couple of similar sentences or sentence fragments. These are intentionally making an effort to be as different as possible, but with the same title and topic.
I checked the Whois of each site you linked, and they're all registered through Reykjavik despite having nothing to do with Iceland. Three of them are even pointing to the same Cloudflare servers.
The relationship between the "writers" and the content here make no sense. I could potentially see the Alabama Delta Gamma chapter posting some of these reviews, but Ninjago? Men's shirts? Shadow the Hedgehog soft toy? "Evan Feinberg" says that he's an advocate for "limited government," and "his" photo is of a white dude, so why is "he" "reviewing" women's fashion and Korean music? What does Cap City Energy have to do with any of this stuff?
By looking into the RSS feed, you can see that most of the articles on a given site were published within the same hour: Evan Feinberg's articles were all posted between 0800-0900 UTC on June 13, 2024. There are only seconds in between them.
Subjective: The content feels very much like slop. Not even current slop, either, but year-ago slop.
Also subjective: The Cap City Energy site doesn't seem to know that "Cap" is probably supposed to be short for "Capital."
If you look in the Internet Archive, you can see that a few (maybe all?) of them used to be real, legitimate sites. Bama Delta Gamma has an archived version that even links to an Instagram that certainly seems to actually be for a sorority. I think that whoever is behind these waited for a URL to become available, snagged it when it expired, copied some of the details (maybe the logo and some images), then fed it along with a list of topics to an AI, and plugged the output into a WordPress site.
- Wow! Detective @ilinamorato@lemmy.world exposed more than I ever would 🙂️ The fact that these use to be legitimate sites is pretty sad. It opens up an entire series of things to think about...
  Thanks for all of that info!
  
  No problem! This is the sort of thing I think everyone will have to learn how to do sooner or later. Viewing source, checking archive.org, and such are just going to be a part of evaluating a site for legitimacy. I'm happy to help make it seem more attainable!
Ads farm
Some affiliate marketer running A/B/C/D analytics on a fake review site. Maybe one of the sites gets better SEO rankings, or a higher click-through rate on the payload. The data will be duly noted and applied to the optimization of future reviews and review blogs.
None of the "reviewers" reviewed anything, or was ever in the same room as any of the products "tested". No effort was made to provide value to you, the reader. Everything on those pages is committed to a single purpose: defrauding Google into defrauding their user base with bad search results. Probably LLM co-authored too, but I've seen similar things before the recent AI boom.
Marketers will destroy anything of value if allowed. This is why we can't have nice things.
I’ve started using Kagi for this reason. I’m tired of searching for something and the top links are all no-name ai slop blogs.
Damn. I've been looking for some decent whole-wheat ramen for ages. I can't believe it's not more popular.
- I agree, maybe I should do a follow up post! I live in the US so the four or so options I ended up saving may be less than cost effective elsewhere. I even found purple noodles made with buckwheat and sweet potatoes 💜
  
  I love the Shin and Buldak brands. I could probably eat ramen every day, but I keep seeing articles about how refined, bleached flour is linked to heart disease. We just can't have anything nice.
Typical AI slop.

11 comments