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I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but marketing content is even more bullshit. I remember times when we had slow internet a
by tuyguntn 6y ago
I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but marketing content is even more bullshit.
I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on.
Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content, but in reality copying from someone else and modifying a little and trying to get lots back links. I remember when Quora had quality content, now everything is sales pitch. I feel like people are not trying to create quality content, they are trying to sell and to sell you need more back links.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago“Content marketing”
- behnamoh 6y ago"bullshit marketing"
- Nextgrid 6y agoWhat we used to call "spam".
- Carpetsmoker 6y agoI don't think all content marketing is bullshit. There are some companies that produce some pretty nice content, for example some of the in-depth Cloudflare stuff, but others as well. It's useful and interesting, but also content marketing.
- alephu5 6y agoDigital ocean write some really good articles too.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoEverything goes to shit when marketing is involved. Or more like, everything goes to shit when money is involved.
- nlitened 6y agoGoogle incentivizes this. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
- nuclearnice1 6y agoDid the poster even name a player?
- RestlessMind 6y agoWall Street incentivizes Google to do this. Don't hate the game, hate the meta-game?
- reaperducer 6y agoGoogle chose to be beholden to Wall Street. It could have chosen to remain private and had a better chance of not harming society.
- kortilla 6y agoWall Street has no say in the matter. The voting shares are majority held by the founders.
- catalogia 6y agoNobody is making the player play the game. There are plenty of other ways to spend your time than advertising on the internet. "Hate the player for choosing to play the game."
- Koshkin 6y agoThat's true, of course, but consider this: if there is no money, there may be nothing to go to shit; that which does not live, does not die, etc.
- anthony_romeo 6y agoOr those fake how-to tutorial pages. Often when I’m looking up, say, error codes in Windows, I need to wade through pages of “Step 1: Download the MyNewFreeComputerCleaner.biz app”
- tuyguntn 6y agoafter working at couple of startups, I also noticed worrying trend. * 21 years old marketer writing about life crisis in 40s * fashion blogger explaining is Teflon harmful or not (come on, fashion and chemistry?) * 18 years old student who never immigrated to another country or studied abroad writing about how difficult is immigrant life and what to look for in different country and many more similar content.
- Carpetsmoker 6y agoAbout 5 years ago I attended a local code meetup and someone gave a presentation about this new TypeScript thing. He basically just explained the basic syntax, concepts. etc. A bit boring, but not the worst I've seen. Then in the Q&A someone asked a "In our experience, we've had problems with X, what's your take?" (I've forgotten what X was specifically), and the guy replied with "well, actually, we haven't really used it yet, we're just looking at it". So ... he basically just read the TypeScript "getting started" tutorial, transformed it to a presentation, and had no real knowledge of TypeScript. The entire talk seemed pretty useless to me. I don't even know how accurate that presentation was, because there's much more to using a language effectively than the basic syntax learned from a glance at a tutorial page.
- jcims 6y agoI can barely speak in front of a crowd on something I’ve got 20 years experience in.
- nitrogen 6y agoThis is still something I really can't wrap my mind around. What is the key difference in early life between people who will speak authoritatively regardless of competence, across the spectrum to experts who can't or won't? I don't think Dunning-Kruger explains it because it's not like every shy expert used to be a gregarious beginner.
- hashberry 6y agoAnd social media (including LinkedIn). There are many tech firms who hire marketers to write tech content for other marketers and potential clients as an advertising and brand-building strategy.
- aledalgrande 6y agoIt is an even bigger problem when searching for advanced/niche concepts: try searching for Redis and Cloudwatch (not Elasticache, plain Redis) and you will get generic AWS docs and "How to get started with Redis" posts.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoPersonal brand building is another major contributor to search engine content dilution. Whenever I Google for something in hot new languages or frameworks, I have to sift through 10s of Medium articles from beginner developers who are trying to establish themselves as industry experts. I don't want to read some junior developer's Medium post full of animated GIFs and a pseudo-tutorial that is really just entire source code files embedded as GitHub gists one file at a time. I just want to skip to the documentation and get to work.
- Jorge1o1 6y agoThe truly worrying development is when those same Medium posts start circling HN. I’m not trying to be elitist, but what I enjoy about HN is seeing truly novel and interesting content, and every “crappy” article on the front page bumps an interesting one downwards into oblivion.
- hn_check 6y agoWorrying development? HN has never been particularly enlightened in this respect, and has all of the same trends and superficial articles that emerge on the other networks. The illusion that it's some higher ground has never held true.
- umvi 6y agoOr when you want to compare two products and the top result(s) are just auto-generated pages that dump the stats/spec of each product side by side. I hate that so much. I want to read what a human who has tried both thinks.
- abacadaba 6y agothe worst
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoIt's surprising Google doesn't downrank such pages.
- weinzierl 6y agoThere was a time when searching for "A vs B" produced useful results. Nowadays a search like this is completely useless. I wish those auto-generated sites would completely disappear from the search results.
- devit 6y agoAppending "reddit" to the query or doing it on Reddit directly can often return usable information.
- dgellow 6y agoIMHO the worst is that lot of young people actually consume, like and share that SEO/marketing stuff and spread it around without much thoughts. That’s the most popular dev content you will find on dev.to, medium, YouTube (for some reasons dev related videos became huge last year), and other publishing platforms. They don’t just generate useless content, they in fact have a public for it, thus little reason to stop.
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoMy life became a lot better when I stopped reading towards data science (on Medium). It was just so much terrible tutorial content which was not only wrong, but actively misleading.
- beckingz 6y agoWhat are your sources for data science news?
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoBooks if you need to learn a topic. Papers if you need to keep up with a topic. I used to follow statsblogs, but that's dead now (the collection, most of the blogs still exist). Anything that isn't covered in these forums probably isn't important enough to worry about.
- Carpetsmoker 6y agoThe internet is a big bucket where everyone drops all sorts of stuff in. Some people drop in gold nuggets, sometimes even diamonds, many other people drop in less valuable materials, and some dump in a torrent of bodily fluids. Our current solution is to rely on magical black box algorithms to give us the diamonds, but it's been creaking for a while. I'm not sure how to make this better: one person's turd is another person's diamond, and people trying to game the system will always be a problem.
- vbezhenar 6y agoOld school links might be a solution. I remember back in the day those blog websites which contained "links" page to the websites that owner likes and recommends. It's true P2P solution and does not require anything to invent. If you own a website and know some rare but valuable gems, just share them. Someone will find them. I think that's how Internet should really work. As a side effect, it should really help Google and other search engines to rank those websites. External links of good quality still the best SEO.
- ricardo81 6y agoYes. Many website owners are too scared to link out because they're worried it'll penalise their rankings in Google. If you have hundreds of outbound links they can also be a pain to manage since so many domains get recycled into something else. But I fully agree, people should be creating their own ecosystems with links, rather than keeping huge portals happy.
- Carpetsmoker 6y agoYeah, I actually maintain such a list on my own site. I should update it more often though. I think the biggest problem isn't so much find "hey, that's a cool article"-type of content, but typing in [programming concept] in Google. What I want to find is things like in-depth experiences and advice regarding this which complement the manual. What I actually find it loads of "howtos" with "copy this" which just rehash the manual. Results vary a bit depending on [programming concept], and I don't think simple "getting started with"-articles are completely useless either. But generally speaking, there are too many of them, many of them are not of high quality, and it obscures more in-depth content. I'm not sure if maintaining a list of links would really solve that. Perhaps community projects like "awesome-foo"-lists have some potential here, but in practice I've found many of them to be dumping grounds rather than carefully curated.
- chrisweekly 6y agoI think the solution (or at least a big part of it) is the resurgence of real blogs. When real developers write deeply technical posts about their experiences, on their own sites, everybody wins. Discovery is an issue, but there have been a number of HN threads recently on ways to mitigate this. Webrings, blogrolls, RSS... there was never going to be a super-convenient or efficient way to generate a high-quality, high signal-to-noise ratio set of sources. But curating your own preferred set of such sites, and making a habit of taking and publishing dev notes on your projects, and participating in the blog revival, is a step in the right direction.
- zepto 6y agoIt’s fair to say that a Google has completely failed at its mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.
- MattGaiser 6y agoNo, they organize the world's information. It is just that the information changed to be more easily organized by Google.
- saalweachter 6y agoGive Sturgeon's Law some credit here.
- hinkley 6y agoIt feels like if you changed the nouns we could be talking about movies. We are, some of us at least, on our guard when a movie has a huge advertising spend because we have been burned by movies where, "all the best parts were in the preview". Do you think it would be possible for us to have any transparency into how hard a web page has been 'advertised' and use that to inform our decision processes? I've no idea what that would even look like.
- staycoolboy 6y agoTo paraphrase Gary Larson, "We know it is bullshit, but what kind of bullshit?"[1] Marketing is fact mixed with coercion. But this is about plagiarism. The author of the article, in just under 800 words, is addressing the "copypasta" nature of a specific discipline: programming. I like the author's characterization of lazy or necessary plagiarism as "consumer" mentality. That's an interesting twist. Was this not the 1970's American Auto Industry attempting to implement Japan's earliest implementation of lean manufacturing? Is the same to be said of any "ripoff" product that cheaply imitates the original: e.g., an off-brand version of an Eames Lounger, or cheaply made webcam off Amazon which is a faulty copy of a Logitech? His observation is a reflection of complex constraints, and while I completely agree individuals should strive for a deep understanding and mastery of what they spend their lives doing, as it benefits us all directly or indirectly by making us conscious citizens (my opinion), I think this is a largely metaphysical reflection lacking contextual nuance rather than a call to action: we've all been in the shoes of his hypothetical individual committing the sin of programmer consumerism, and for good reason. However, I do appreciate the clarity his transformation applies to a scenario we are all intimately engaged in. [1] "We know they are idiots, the question is, 'What kind of idiots?'"
- rdiddly 6y agoOf all the people who got all excited that the internet would "democratize information," most seemed to be thinking on the demand side. And it did come to pass, but very few seem to have anticipated that it would democratize the supply side too. Turns out the much-maligned elitism and gatekeeping of the past were actually performing (with imperfect fairness perhaps) the quality-control function they always purported to be performing.
- monadic2 6y ago> Turns out the much-maligned elitism and gatekeeping of the past were actually performing (with imperfect fairness perhaps) the quality-control function they always purported to be performing. Do you have an example? I’m getting strong “century of the self” vibes from this post. If you’re referring to “fake news”, you should also acknowledge that the current protests across the nation would not exist at all without social media. People who want to characterize the effects as monolithically positive or negative leave me scratching my head, and I certainly don’t want to return to getting all my news via AP.
- rdiddly 6y agoI don't get the reference. Worry less about "vibes," I guess would be my advice. And consider that if someone says "brown cows eat grass" they're not trying to describe the entire universe; they're actually taking it as a given that your brain will work hard enough to remember that non-brown cows, and non-grass-eating cows, and even brown, non-grass-eating cows exist and have their own stories that are outside the scope of this one. "Once upon a time, Little Red Riding Hood was going to go to..." "NOT ALL RIDING HOODS ARE RED AND FRANKLY I OBJECT TO ANYONE WHO MONOLITHICALLY TRIES TO SAY SO AND I'M GETTING A VIBE... SEIZE HIM!" To teach yourself programming in 1990 you would've gone to a bookstore or library, that employed a buyer/curator, who bought from a distributor, who bought from a publisher, who bought from an author, who probably also dealt with an agent and an editor. Other than the author and his/her own desire to produce something good, there were 3-5 other layers in the process, 3-5 other entities making the decision, should we submit this, should we publish this, should we distribute this, should we buy this and devote shelf space to selling it. Each of those steps is a gate through which only a limited quantity can pass, so whatever else it actually means, the book you pick up off the shelf in 1990 has passed through all those gates. Nowadays excellent and shitty writers alike are free of that.
- paulcole 6y agoYou do realize it was tech bros and not marketers who invented Google SEO right?
- ozim 6y agoMy solution for this problem: 1) stop trying to learn from random blogs, get a book. Books are still out there and you can learn just as good from them now as 20 years ago. 2) Get a subset of blogs to follow and stick to it. If you want to search in specific sites google has "site:" operator, you can search on specific sites. 3) by following 1 and 2 you can easily stop visiting shitty blogs made only for SEO, when they won't see any traffic they will fold because they will see no one is caring about what they write. I am in process of implementing that. Got some books from humble bundle in topic that I am interested in, so no browsing crap until I get through those.
- mdoms 6y agoUnfortunately today a lot of the good content is hosted on the same domains as the terrible content. This is one of the many great downsides to content centralization. If I read a really great piece of tech content it's not going to help me to use that domain in a site: query later when it's so often going to be medium.com or dev.to (which is starting to fill up with this same kind of bullshit content in the article).
- user00012-ab 6y agoThe main reason books are better is because they are harder to write and produce. The person making the book actually has to invest a lot of their time in making it happen, unlike a blog post. I've seen lots of articles on hacker news (and other places) that is "PART 1 of..." which does the introduction to what they plan on teaching, and then it just dies right there in the land of "PART 1's" With a book, if you stop at part 1, no one is going to publish your book. Another thing about books/web, is books go MUCH deeper into topics. It seems like 99% of the content on the web is "INTRO to xyz" but never "Advanced xyz" Books are also broken into logical section so you have a learning path you can progress through; not just random content that you are to piece together yourself. So, yes, very good advice; if you want to learn something, read the book. blog posts are more just advertisements for buying an actual book.
- weinzierl 6y ago>"1) stop trying to learn from random blogs, get a book. Books are still out there and you can learn just as good from them now as 20 years ago." Many books are not much better. While blog posts are bloated for SEO purposes, books are bloated to reach their target page count.
- alibarber 6y agoUggh - this! Maybe I'm so used to it for programming queries, but I've gotten back into electronics and ham radio after a long time, and have always dreamed of owning a decent oscilloscope. Googling 'good digital hobbyist oscilloscope' just now was a frustrating waste of time. It's just pages and pages of regurgitated specs and affiliate links, no useful _actual_ reviews or anything... Take this top 10 result. It's on Medium which is new and hip and nice so must be of high quality... https://medium.com/@Amyperlman/best-buying-oscilloscope-for-hobby-2018-updated-guideline-d9a3b5dd6ff5 https://medium.com/@Amyperlman/best-buying-oscilloscope-for-... Oh cool, hmm ok - what else does the author write about? "Things to consider before buying a camera for hunting" - "Drug Rehab for Married Couples" - <<Several>> Reviews for a particular line of vaccum cleaner, Baltimore Security Cameras and Interior Design in India. I mean sure they could genuinely have diverse interests and a chaotic and international personal life - but these articles are just keyword stuffing for another bunch of 'content' that will helpfully let you 'check the price on Amazon' for just about anything...
- gregmac 6y agoEven though I generally prefer reading to watching, I've found in the past few years that YouTube is better for reviews, and I think it's actually because of this. If you don't actually recognize the channel, you can usually tell if it's worthwhile by subscriber count, the other (types of) videos they've posted, and usually just by watching for tens of seconds. Most paid reviews seem to say so (unlike written blogs), and you can judge their bias appropriately. Plus for many things, seeing it in action is much, much better than written descriptions or (carefully chosen) pictures. For example, it's hard to disguise a crappy oscilloscope UI in a video (and if the reviewer doesn't show that, be suspicious!)
- learc83 6y agoYoutube is better, but over the last few years, I've noticed that it's getting harder to find decent reviews, because the algorithm recommends so many fake review channels. It's better than a google search, but there's still so many terrible results to sort through. Youtube's algorithm encourages video farms that upload frequently even if they recycle content. Ann Reardon discusses this problem as it relates to recipe video's frequently on her cooking channel.
- bartread 6y ago> I believe part of problem is Google SEO. This and the fact that Google search is actually as dumb as a sackful of hammers. Don't get me wrong, for the longest time Google's results were "good enough", but Google has no real concept of the quality of a result (they've tried and it worked for a while - e.g., PageRank). Still, fundamentally their algorithms aren't smart enough to figure out whether any given piece of content is intrinsically worthwhile. That's really important in a world where most content is, regardless of Google's guidelines, primarily written for the benefit of GoogleBot, to harvest clicks or drive traffic. Unfortunately Google has literally zero incentive to change this situation (because they're making an insane amount of money off the back of the status quo), so they won't[1]. Logically then, the time is ripe for a new search engine to disrupt but the problem - that of determining intrinsic worth - is really hard to solve, so as yet nobody has, and Google still reigns supreme as the most popular search engine. [1] It is also possible that I'm being too harsh here: they might be trying to change it - perhaps because they're worried about eventually being disrupted - but, as noted in the following paragraph, the problem is REALLY hard.
- tomxor 6y agoWhat I don't get is how SEO isn't countered by unvisiting... By which I mean navigating back to the google search, I always assumed that would be a clear indicator to google that it's not what the user was looking for. Maybe this does happen but it not weighted highly enough against SEO.
- jason0597 6y agoA lot of times I middle click any interesting links I find on Google, in which case it becomes hard for Google to know if I unvisited a site. It's not like they can track me clicking the Back button on my browser and arriving back to the search results
- bartread 6y agoI've no idea whether they do this or not but it's easy enough to know when a tab or window is focussed or not. I have a games site and use this to pause/unpause games, music, etc. They could hook this into Google Analytics and subtract the time you spent with that tab/window not focussed from your session duration. I do fundamentally agree that session duration may not be the worst proxy for worthwhile content or, at least, engaging content, snd I think Google may use it as such.
- aledalgrande 6y agoI think this problem expands to tech meetups. It is very difficult to find a quality meetup. Most people never used the tech and the presenters make gross errors. Most recent I remember was a person trying to explain why GraphQL is good for APIs, while showing code with crazy N+1s. Certainly didn't convince me. I'm not saying everyone should be an expert, but I would want the whole spectrum of experience represented. Now I don't invest time in meetups any more.
- watwut 6y agoMeetups cater almost exclusively to younger people who want to learn something and socialize. I don't think it is particularly wrong, but more experienced people tend to be older and less likely to have inclination or time to prepare talk or go to pub every week or so.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoConfluent's marketing content for Kafka does an amazing job of making Kafka sound like the solution for every problem. I have a hard to understanding what it can actually do because the content is stuffed with so much selling and adjectives.
- Animats 6y ago"Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content, but in reality copying from someone else and modifying a little and trying to get lots (of) back links." That's the real problem. There is a market for short-form clickbait crap. One can make a living writing that. There is not much of a market for long-form accurate technical material.