Post #4472957
2026-08-09 23:35 UTC
I’ve been thinking about my relationship to companies like Google.
For a while, being indexed by a search engine benefited me, but these days, it is much more likely that my work is scraped and repacked as AI slop, and that I receive nothing in return.
The option of de-indexing oneself is generally considered to be amputating your own limbs, ensuring nobody will ever know you exist again.
Another possibility occurs to me, although as a cave woman I could use the insight of someone smarter.
Replies (1)
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@Haste@mastodon.social 2026-08-09 23:41
My question: what is to say that de-indexing needs to be a binary decision? Is there not a way that I can create a decoy website— say, a barebones list of the sort of thing someone might receive from me— but quarantined from my actual website or content? Said page would serve to prove to a human that I exist, and tell them how to find it, but contain nothing of value to corporations. Meanwhile, the real site black-holes anything resembling a robot, and explicitly requests to be de-indexed.