Watch Out for "Internet Culture" Quiz

[lwood]

Guys, by taking that Internet Cultural IQ test, and mindlessly copying and pasting the results, you're putting up ads for sex toys in your blog--the quiz is powered by a purveyor thereof, and puts a leetleittybittyteensy link to their site in the test results.

The purpose, of course, is to farm more links for that particular vendor, and encourage the clicking and the buying. The creation of a zillyun links makes the purveyor look better in search engine results--resulting in big business for whoever put the quiz online. You, Gentle Reader, are being used, as the quiz nowhere says "PIMP SEX TOYS NAO Y/N?"

I suppose the fact that you filled out a silly quiz to tack the ad online makes this slightly more scrupulous than other tacky forms of search engine optimization (that's the buzzword-compliant way to say "make Google love me best"). It's better than, say, having automated bots fill photo galleries and boards with ads/links for stuff, but only just.

By the by, the page that lists the "badges" doesn't show you the link/ad, either, so it'll only show up when you paste it. You wouldn't've ordinarily noticed this in the headlong rush to post your results; I only saw it when looking at another person's results just now.

So I shan't be posting my results--I did, however, get 138, so there. 8-P

Y'all might want to consider deleting your results entries to cut back on the mildly skanky link farming for sex toys (assuming you don't know how to just pull out the advertisement part).

-- Lorrie

Comments

[wolfs-daugher.livejournal.com]

Thanks L~! I just deleted my results. That's definitely skanky!

Sparrow

[weofodthignen]

Proud of my 81 in any case :-)

M

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen it on any of my flist yet. I assume that the dodgy link is in the HTML they supply to paste directly into a blog or whatever -- I normally ignore that and copy text from the rendered page and paste that (or I paste the HTML into VIM and cut it down to just the bits I want and paste that, because I dislike seeing dozens of replies all with all of the links).

[hljod-huskona.livejournal.com]

That's horribly sneaky. I'll be sure to either modify the HTML in such quizzes....or simply stay away from them...I wouldn't want to support such slippery attempts. Thanks for the heads up. When in the future I do quizzes, I'll be on the lookout.

[gnowun.livejournal.com]

Pretty easy to not only excise the ad crap but also hack the numeric results. =)