The Luddite

I recently decided to run ads on a website that I own. I've never done this before. As you probably already know, I hate the ad-driven internet, but over my many years of coding, I've had many side projects, and some of these websites, browser extensions, reddit bots, and so on have proven quite popular. It is the greatest joy to make something that people find useful, or better still, makes people happy, but while others' joy does nourish the soul, it does not pay the bills. Recently, I've been spending a lot of time on one of these aforementioned side projects, which means I've been spending less time on my paid work. This has caused me to look at some of my many projects with a renewed, perhaps more ideologically compromising perspective.

The crushing irony of running ads on The Luddite seemed too much, so I tried to find the least humiliating thing I've made to attempt to monetize. I chose Apportionment Calculator. It's an interactive implementation of the algorithm used to calculate Congressional Apportionment, or the number of congressional seats each state will get based on the census. It's a neat recursive algorithm, and I made the site after being dissatisfied with all the existing online implementations. For years now, the site is consistently the top Google search result for "apportionment calculator," and gets a steady stream of traffic. It's a good website. It does one thing, and it does it well.¹

You might've noticed that I linked you to "theluddite.org/apportionment.html." This is not actually where the Apportionment Calculator lives, but instead, a link to what the site looked like last week, before Google made me make it worse on purpose to make money. It is common knowledge that Google is cluttering the internet with SEO blogspam ad-driven garbage; less known is how direct, and even banal, this causal relationship really is. Much has been written about how Google results are getting worse. Most readers are probably old enough to remember searching for recipes in the early 2010s and being linked to useful websites. Now the results look like this:

You can tell just by looking at the URLs that those sites are going to be worthelss blogspam. The results for recipes have become so absurd that there are now tools that exist just to extract the recipe from these cluttered, presumed exemplars of capitalist efficiency. Here's a screenshot of what you see if you click the first result:

The page is full of ads. You have to scroll past a dozen or so photos, links to videos, calls to share the recipe on social media, more ads, worthless descriptions of how much the author loves to take this crisp to fall potlucks, discussions on what ingredients can be substituted, even more ads, and so on, until you finally reach the damn recipe.

Here is a screenshot of that page, cleaned up using this recipe extraction tool.

What an improvement! This is what Google results for recipes looked like just 10 years ago. Like last week's version of the Apportionment Calculator, it gives you what you're looking for. No more, no less.

At this point in my story, I was just trying to monetize my site, not generate a case study in how Google has ruined the internet, so I did try to avoid using Google's ad network, called AdSense. I looked into a half-dozen or so alternatives, but all the other companies were either simply Google ads re-sellers, which is an ecosystem I don't quite understand, or were extremely sketchy, and had reviews complaining about how they trick people into downloading malware and such. I'm willing to sell people unregulated erectile dysfunction medication or tell them about sexy singles in their area, but tricking people into downloading viruses is a bit too far.

Having personally confirmed Google's monopoly on advertising, I dutifully created my Google AdSense account, like many an aspiring entrepreneur before me. There, I learned that my website had to be approved by Google. After a relatively painless application process, I submitted it for review. 24 hours later, I received the following email:

I didn't think to screenshot it at the time, but the AdSense UI gave me more information. It said my website didn't meet their guidelines, and that this usually means I don't have unique content, and/or my content is unoriginal. In my innocence, I figured that this must be a simple mistake. Surely, the rushed reviewer didn't realize that my tool wasn't simply a table containing the census results, but a neat interactive tool that people actually use every single day, so I added a little blurb to the top explaining this and resubmitted it. 24 hours later, I received the same rejection email, with the same information.

This time, I did some research. I talked to people I know who actually know about these things.² I read some forums. The unanimous conclusion was that Google wants you to have a lot of content before they will approve you, and more importantly, the quality of the content doesn't really matter. Instead of feeling defeated, like every other millennial that doesn't want to work, I decided to hustle. I rose and groaned. I turned to the crucible of mediocrity.

First, I asked ChatGPT to write the history of congressional apportionment. I even had it format it into HTML, after which I blindly copy-pasted it without so much as reading it. In fact, I still have no idea what it says. The site still looked sparse, and my research said that Google likes a lot of content. I decided to follow the age-old advice, "write what you know." Since most of my interaction with SEO/advertising blogspam is recipes, I added a "Recipes" tab, and asked ChatGPT to create an apportionment-themed recipes page for a blog about congressional apportionment, which it titled "Apportionment Eats: Recipes Celebrating American Representation." Here's one of the recipes it made:

This is such deranged, low-quality content. I figured that there's no way Google would actually approve it, but at this point, I was committed, and everyone who makes The Luddite happen was now involved, along with a few friends. We brainstormed what other pages we could add to the site, and decided to add a "poetry corner" and a "monthly riddle contest." We asked ChatGPT to create these pages. Here's a sample poem, from the page ChatGPT titled "Voices of Allocation," though I admit we contributed to this one by inventing the pseudonym:

Since poems don't really require logical consistency, it is, relatively speaking, not so bad at generating plausible mediocre poetry, but it's terrible at riddles. Here's a sample from the page it titled "Riddle the Seats: Puzzles on Congressional Apportionment."

In researching how much content was enough, we had learned that Google prefers that you have a blog. People on the internet theorize that this is because blogs are continuously updated, and therefore people will keep coming back. This seems a tenuous theory, but who are we to question Google? What Google wants Google gets. We asked ChatGPT to generate us a blog page for the proprietors of this site, who call themselves the "Apportionistas." We explained to ChatGPT that they are a couple with a dog named Nero, a cat named Scipio, and an unhealthy and frankly unhinged obsession with congressional apportionment. Here's their most recent post, about their apportionment/scrapbooking hobby:

ChatGPT made us several blogposts, each more deranged than the last. The first post, allegedly from September of 2022, starts like this: "Our adventure takes us beyond the realm of congressional apportionment and into the crisp orchards of autumn – yes, you guessed it, it's apple-picking season," and they sign off with the delightfully absurd and wildly implausible valediction, "[w]ith apples and democracy in mind."

The Luddite's crack illustrator also made a few quick drawings, the only part of the content we added to appease Google that isn't absolute trash. Here's our obnoxiously patriotic logo:

Satisfied that we had enough content, but also convinced that Alex and Taylor belong on the no-fly list, I re-submitted the site for review. Previous submissions had taken 24 hours, but this took a week. It was agonizing. Every night, I worried the Secret Service would break down my door looking for these deeply disturbed, apple-picking threats to national security, and every morning I excitedly checked my email, hoping they would approve me. Finally, on the 5th of September, in the year of Our Lord 2023, Google approved Alex and Taylor, two probably dangerous perverts, to display Google ads.

It is my distinct pleasure to present to you, my fellow Apportionistas, the stupidest thing I have ever made: apportionmentcalculator.com.