Author here. I wasn't trying to imply that this is a commonly used phrase nowadays. You can see from the sources I linked, there is definitely history to HCF and even some truth to its phrase. But yes, it was mostly a joke
I made a "bot" server for myself, which is really just a server and app framework to host a bunch of scripts. The framework handles:
- Running bots periodically
- Receives webhooks
- Handles OAuth
- Provides a shared DB
- Posts updates to and receives commands from Slack
It's not very innovative, but super helpful. I love that I can deploy a new script so easily and already have all the tools I need so I can just focus in the logic. A few bots I have running:
- I run a site with thousands of articles, so one bot checks 10-15 articles per day for spelling mistakes, broken links, broken images, poor formatting, etc. Tasks to fix these are then posted to Notion.
- Monitor Hacker News and Reddit for mentions of the sites/apps that I run so I can respond.
- Sync calendars between apps without having to make them public
- Gather financials and reports from various sources for bookkeeping
- Monitor all of the servers we run and sync their status to Notion
Probably at least half of the automations could work on something like Zapier, but this is more fun and I get a lot more control over them.
> is Google just having trouble recognizing that these are using stolen content?
It's very possible. In general Google will penalize you for duplicate content, but that might not apply to code snippets since code is often re-used within projects or between projects.
The code snippet sites also typically have 2 or more snippets on the same page. When combined, it might then look unique to Google since their algorithm probably can't understand code as well as it understands natural text. Just a guess
For years now I've ran a programming site (stackabuse.com) and have closely followed the state of Google SERPs when it comes to programming content. A few thoughts/ramblings:
- The search results for programming content has been very volatile the last year or so. Google has released a lot of core algorithm updates in the last year, which has caused a lot of high-quality sites to either lose traffic or stagnate.
- These low-quality code snippet sites have always been around, but their traffic has exploded this year after the algorithm changes. Just look at traffic estimates for one of the worst offenders - they get an estimated 18M views each month now, which has grown almost 10x in 12 months. Compare that to SO, which has stayed flat or even dropped in the same time-frame
- The new algorithm updates seem to actually hurt a lot of high-quality sites as it seemingly favors code snippets, exact-match phrases, and lots of internal linking. Great sites with well-written long-form content, like RealPython.com, don't get as much attention as they deserve, IMO. We try to publish useful content, but consistently have our traffic slashed by Google's updates, which end up favoring copy-pasted code from SO, GitHub, and even our own articles.
- The programming content "industry" is highly fragmented (outside of SO) and difficult to monetize, which is why so many sites are covered in ads. Because of this, it's a land grab for traffic and increasing RPMs with more ads, hence these low-quality snippet sites. Admittedly, we monetize with ads but are actively trying to move away from it with paid content. It's a difficult task as it's hard to convince programmers to pay for anything, so the barrier to entry is high unless you monetize with ads.
- I'll admit that this is likely a difficult problem because of how programmer's use Google. My guess is that because we often search for obscure errors/problems/code, their algorithm favors exact-match phrases to better find the solution. They might then give higher priority to pages that seem like they're dedicated to whatever you searched for (i.e. the low-quality snippet sites) over a GitHub repo that contains that snippet _and_ a bunch of other unrelated code.
Just my two cents. Interested to hear your thoughts :)