Fighting spam

If I don't tend to the platform, it will become an NSFW site. Like tumblr or something worse. Then every other day a backlink farmer starts a blog to link to random sites with LLM-generated posts.

To keep platform health in check, I do a few things. I've disabled search engine indexing on free blogs by default. If I see someone posting organically, then I enable indexing manually for that blog.

Drawing the boundary in spam or not is sometimes harder than you think. Doing it responsibly is even more difficult.

I deleted many blogs linking to porn sites and those were obviously spam. I've deleted some other blogs where posts were basically scores of links to different files on file-sharing services.

However, there are blogs that use AI-generated posts and in each post, they link to their brand's website 2-3 times. Sometimes the same post exists on many other blogging platforms as well. They are obviously spam but so far I am tolerating that. I haven't deleted those but I don't index them.

For free blogs, it's critical to monitor because they eventually live on lykhari.com domain and impact its standing. I don't want the organic customers to be penalized because of spammers.

Then there are some blogs that put random LLM slop and in each post, they link to different businesses. Those seem like backlink sellers and I've deleted quite a few of them.

I don't delete test blogs. There are many who just started a blog to test the platform and didn't post anything. Those live. Those are organic and genuine people.