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The point of the chief editor is so true that I'm surprised to read that from them. I have noticed that a lot of times with this kind of web media. - You have

The point of the chief editor is so true that I'm surprised to read that from them. I have noticed that a lot of times with this kind of web media. - You have a clickbait title like this: "How a normal guy managed to hack WallStreet with a simple pen" - Then, you have one page of interesting introduction on the topic but without the reply to the title question. "In november 2018, WallStreet was busy with the introduction of xxxx, and suddenly a problem happened, everything went black. To understand, wallstreet works with computers that are connected with a modern system... 300 words ... and on that cold night of the 23 nov 2020, one man John Crowford destroyed all of that." - Then you have 10 pages of useless crap and fake intervews about the childhood of the guy and a lot of things that are not interesting, and not related to the subject. "His mother was blond, she liked to eat fries. But despite that, John Crowford liked to eat popcorn. So much that his friend reported that, one time, he stayed at a movie theater for a whole day just to eat popcorns ... Studies at the yyy school were ok, but he followed them without passion until he met Carolinas Brocolis a hot night of summer 1992. Together they got 3 kids ... he was not supposed to live in New York as he was born in California, but he found a job there, ..." - And then, you finally have the explanation that is, most of the time, short and straightforward. "So, he was hired as a Janitor in Wall Street, and accidentally put his pen inside the holes of a power plug, resulting in a major power failure. THE END" After reading such a story, either you did skip to the end directly, or you are very angry to have lost so much time reading useless things.

function_seven 6y ago
My god you hit the nail on the head. It's frustrating to try and read those articles. Even when they have an actual story to tell, but choose to interleave some sort of "B plot" all throughout the writing. I'm left guessing which pages I can skip and which ones are worth reading. Wishing they'd just put all the background info in a standalone section.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
The world needs more heroes like John Crowford, now more than ever.
Youden 6y ago
In case someone wants an example of an actual published story that looks like this, here's one from the NY Times: https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-is-the-mystery-shopper-leaving-behind-all-those-online-shopping-carts-11593617464 https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-is-the-mystery-shopper-leav... 1100 words to answer the titular question, which really only needed a paragraph or two.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  Isn't that the Wall St. Journal? I have a sub for the NYT, and it's asking me to subscribe.
- Simulacra 6y ago
  Reporters might miss the God complex that Journalism class gave them.
- MR4D 6y ago
  Wall Street Journal, not the NY Times. I read that article the other day - it was infuriating in it's poor signal to noise ratio.
- hef19898 6y ago
  That is something I really hate, articles that are heavy on fluff with maybe 3 sentences of crunch in them. If I want to read a story, I take a book. This whole story telling thing, applied to everything, has a tendency to drive me crazy.
- vlod 6y ago
  That shone a light on a browser habit I've started to do. If I see an article I want to read, I generally don't bother reading it like a normal human: 1) reading the bullet list of TLDR points at the top and becz I'm sooo buzy with stuff to do, hit the back button. 2) reading the whole article trying to get past all the drivel to get to the 'good stuff'. No.. I immediately skip at least 2-4 paragraphs and start doing a search for words that are in my just created inverted-index of the title. Yeah... I've turned into a mini-google borg subnode processing unit :/ Inevitable as others have pointed out, it's just one sentence that is what I'm looking for and I leave disappointed. sigh
gknight 6y ago
This is so true. When I click on a compelling headline and the article starts with some sort of description unrelated to the headline like that, I bail.
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
This is merely a consequence of SEO. Have you tried searching for recipes? It's absolutely miserable. I don't need irrelevant life stories-- show me the ingredient list and instructions.
- angmarsbane 6y ago
  I use the copymethat browser plugin to strip everything but the recipe out of the page - I HIGHLY recommend it.
- azinman2 6y ago
  All that is there for SEO? I’ve been wondering why this new format is so ubiquitous.
- puranjay 6y ago
  Blame Google. A few years ago, it started prioritizing pages that had a high word count. So SEOs had no option but to pad up their pages with filler content. I've personally seen a page go from #20 to #2 just by adding 1000 extra words of content.
  - akiselev 6y ago
    It's more than that. Google tracks how long you stay on a page whenever you use the back button to go back to the search results. The longer you stay on that page, the better the page will rank so once everyone figured it out, we started getting all that useless fluff before recipes because it increases the time spent on pages.
    - puranjay 6y ago
      Longer content also means you can cram more keywords in there, which means that your page can rank for a broader range of queries. It works from an SEO perspective but as a user, I really wish they'd do away with it.
    - kohtatsu 6y ago
      I've thought a lot about how Google is fucking privacy over, but I haven't appreciated how badly they've managed to hamper the web. It's not entirely their fault, SEO hacking isn't an easy problem, but the open web has certainly faltered under their stewardship. It's so incompetent it almost looks like an effort to make it harder to find things without having Google's AI cut it into small bite sized pieces. I think Google and Facebook have a lot to atone for.
alecco 6y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/ https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/
basch 6y ago
Ive noticed the clickfarm agglomerated story style has infected what is supposed to be professional journalism. Some hallmarks of this style include - paragraphs are one sentence long - there isnt so much an order or train of thought, just a vomit of quotes - implying random quotes equate some kind of consensus or prevailing sentiment in group thought - an article that isnt anything more than the bunch of embedded quotes - a summary of the article at the beginning, that is really just four of the "paragraphs" below regurgitated up top. makes it really annoying, forcing you to read entire "paragraphs" twice. - an almost nonsequituresque repetitiveness, where half way through an article it almost starts over with slightly different words. as if the author forgot they already mentioned things, or decided to copy the article again to both trick people who scroll half way down an article, and to meet a word count. - extremely poor formatting, making it difficult to distinguish the article from the summary, the image quotes, ads for other articles. - articles that assume the reader has absolutely no domain knowledge, and spend half their words defining basic things. - and thats all with an ad blocker on, I imagine the experience is 10x worse without one. Business insider has been a big offender, a place that was already clickbait, but has devolved into something even worse. It's as if BI decided the daily mail was the best exemplar to emulate. Its a strange mix of DailyMail, Buzzfeed, and Vox. Something that gives the illusion of being an explainer, a listicle, and reporting at the same time. I am honestly shocked they purposely employ people with this writing style, it makes me want to be the change I want to see in the world and drop everything and get a job writing better journalism, just to try and displace some of the cruft. Their "editors" are doing absolutely nothing to take quote vomit and shape it into something coherent. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/day-trader-made-million-lost-it-all-cautionary-tale-investing-2020-7-1029383192# https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/day-trader-m... https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/wirecard-stock-robinhood-traders-are-shying-away-from-investing-daytrader-2020-7-1029366881# https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/wirecard-sto... This article is a great example of a weird listical, where the quotes themselves are the h1 bold headline and the body of the paragraph is just a picture of the person that adds nothing to the story. But not consistently, by the last one, the header is just a header, and the quote is the body. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/day-trading-boom-the-best-quotes-from-billionaires-2020-6-1029355205# https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/day-trading-... (Should listicle/listical look like popsicle or nautical.)
MR4D 6y ago
I wonder if someone will start an enterprising site that summarizes all these articles and then sells advertising. Sort of a Cliff's Notes version.
- LukeLambert 6y ago
  I think that was sort of Axios's goal.
gandalfian 6y ago
It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper. Jerry Seinfeld
jedberg 6y ago
There is a subreddit on reddit specifically for these types of articles, called savedyouaclick. Their number one rule is that the link title must repeat the article's payoff. Then you can decide if you still want to read the long article. https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/ https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/
- fakeyguy 6y ago
  One of the most useful links. thank you!
- refurb 6y ago
  That’s kind of amazing and is an entirely different experience to our typical consumption of media.
xster 6y ago
I mean I don't know what else to say besides the fact that Bloomberg itself deserves all the blame for having a reporter compensation scheme that rewards article's that "move the market". https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensation-2013-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa... It's like a fire chief coming out and saying I don't like the state of our neighbourhood after implementing firefighter pay per size of the fire.
- smabie 6y ago
  What does that have to do with long articles? Are you suggesting long articles move the market more? Personally, I don't think paying journalists bonuses based on market moves a bad idea. Sure, there's sometimes misaligned incentives, but you could say the same about any compensation scheme.
  - xster 6y ago
    Neither the OP or the grandparent or my post had anything to do with long article's. The original premise is mediocre articles.
    - smabie 6y ago
      Yeah but the TFA was mostly about long articles.
mongol 6y ago
That was hilarious, please apply to the position as chief editor!
- rapnie 6y ago
  I agree, or at least turn this into a 10-page blog post. I'll forgive you the clickbait title.
creaghpatr 6y ago
I think people like to identify with these founders that are being put on a pedestal in these articles, which is why those mundane childhood stories are included. But you're definitely right, after reading a few of these the template gets stale pretty quick.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jandrese 6y ago
One of my favorite subreddits is /r/savedyouaclick where people go through big awful articles like that and summarize the whole thing in a line or two. A surprising number never even answer the question in the title, spending the entire time off on tangents.

function_seven 6y ago

My god you hit the nail on the head. It's frustrating to try and read those articles. Even when they have an actual story to tell, but choose to interleave some sort of "B plot" all throughout the writing. I'm left guessing which pages I can skip and which ones are worth reading. Wishing they'd just put all the background info in a standalone section.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

The world needs more heroes like John Crowford, now more than ever.

Youden 6y ago

In case someone wants an example of an actual published story that looks like this, here's one from the NY Times: https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-is-the-mystery-shopper-leaving-behind-all-those-online-shopping-carts-11593617464 https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-is-the-mystery-shopper-leav... 1100 words to answer the titular question, which really only needed a paragraph or two.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Isn't that the Wall St. Journal? I have a sub for the NYT, and it's asking me to subscribe.
Simulacra 6y ago
Reporters might miss the God complex that Journalism class gave them.
MR4D 6y ago
Wall Street Journal, not the NY Times. I read that article the other day - it was infuriating in it's poor signal to noise ratio.
hef19898 6y ago
That is something I really hate, articles that are heavy on fluff with maybe 3 sentences of crunch in them. If I want to read a story, I take a book. This whole story telling thing, applied to everything, has a tendency to drive me crazy.
vlod 6y ago
That shone a light on a browser habit I've started to do. If I see an article I want to read, I generally don't bother reading it like a normal human: 1) reading the bullet list of TLDR points at the top and becz I'm sooo buzy with stuff to do, hit the back button. 2) reading the whole article trying to get past all the drivel to get to the 'good stuff'. No.. I immediately skip at least 2-4 paragraphs and start doing a search for words that are in my just created inverted-index of the title. Yeah... I've turned into a mini-google borg subnode processing unit :/ Inevitable as others have pointed out, it's just one sentence that is what I'm looking for and I leave disappointed. sigh

gknight 6y ago

This is so true. When I click on a compelling headline and the article starts with some sort of description unrelated to the headline like that, I bail.

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago

This is merely a consequence of SEO. Have you tried searching for recipes? It's absolutely miserable. I don't need irrelevant life stories-- show me the ingredient list and instructions.

angmarsbane 6y ago
I use the copymethat browser plugin to strip everything but the recipe out of the page - I HIGHLY recommend it.
azinman2 6y ago
All that is there for SEO? I’ve been wondering why this new format is so ubiquitous.
puranjay 6y ago
Blame Google. A few years ago, it started prioritizing pages that had a high word count. So SEOs had no option but to pad up their pages with filler content. I've personally seen a page go from #20 to #2 just by adding 1000 extra words of content.
- akiselev 6y ago
  It's more than that. Google tracks how long you stay on a page whenever you use the back button to go back to the search results. The longer you stay on that page, the better the page will rank so once everyone figured it out, we started getting all that useless fluff before recipes because it increases the time spent on pages.
  - puranjay 6y ago
    Longer content also means you can cram more keywords in there, which means that your page can rank for a broader range of queries. It works from an SEO perspective but as a user, I really wish they'd do away with it.
  - kohtatsu 6y ago
    I've thought a lot about how Google is fucking privacy over, but I haven't appreciated how badly they've managed to hamper the web. It's not entirely their fault, SEO hacking isn't an easy problem, but the open web has certainly faltered under their stewardship. It's so incompetent it almost looks like an effort to make it harder to find things without having Google's AI cut it into small bite sized pieces. I think Google and Facebook have a lot to atone for.

alecco 6y ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/ https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/

basch 6y ago

Ive noticed the clickfarm agglomerated story style has infected what is supposed to be professional journalism. Some hallmarks of this style include - paragraphs are one sentence long - there isnt so much an order or train of thought, just a vomit of quotes - implying random quotes equate some kind of consensus or prevailing sentiment in group thought - an article that isnt anything more than the bunch of embedded quotes - a summary of the article at the beginning, that is really just four of the "paragraphs" below regurgitated up top. makes it really annoying, forcing you to read entire "paragraphs" twice. - an almost nonsequituresque repetitiveness, where half way through an article it almost starts over with slightly different words. as if the author forgot they already mentioned things, or decided to copy the article again to both trick people who scroll half way down an article, and to meet a word count. - extremely poor formatting, making it difficult to distinguish the article from the summary, the image quotes, ads for other articles. - articles that assume the reader has absolutely no domain knowledge, and spend half their words defining basic things. - and thats all with an ad blocker on, I imagine the experience is 10x worse without one. Business insider has been a big offender, a place that was already clickbait, but has devolved into something even worse. It's as if BI decided the daily mail was the best exemplar to emulate. Its a strange mix of DailyMail, Buzzfeed, and Vox. Something that gives the illusion of being an explainer, a listicle, and reporting at the same time. I am honestly shocked they purposely employ people with this writing style, it makes me want to be the change I want to see in the world and drop everything and get a job writing better journalism, just to try and displace some of the cruft. Their "editors" are doing absolutely nothing to take quote vomit and shape it into something coherent. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/day-trader-made-million-lost-it-all-cautionary-tale-investing-2020-7-1029383192# https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/day-trader-m... https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/wirecard-stock-robinhood-traders-are-shying-away-from-investing-daytrader-2020-7-1029366881# https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/wirecard-sto... This article is a great example of a weird listical, where the quotes themselves are the h1 bold headline and the body of the paragraph is just a picture of the person that adds nothing to the story. But not consistently, by the last one, the header is just a header, and the quote is the body. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/day-trading-boom-the-best-quotes-from-billionaires-2020-6-1029355205# https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/day-trading-... (Should listicle/listical look like popsicle or nautical.)

MR4D 6y ago

I wonder if someone will start an enterprising site that summarizes all these articles and then sells advertising. Sort of a Cliff's Notes version.

LukeLambert 6y ago
I think that was sort of Axios's goal.

gandalfian 6y ago

It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper. Jerry Seinfeld

jedberg 6y ago

There is a subreddit on reddit specifically for these types of articles, called savedyouaclick. Their number one rule is that the link title must repeat the article's payoff. Then you can decide if you still want to read the long article. https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/ https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/

fakeyguy 6y ago
One of the most useful links. thank you!
refurb 6y ago
That’s kind of amazing and is an entirely different experience to our typical consumption of media.

xster 6y ago

I mean I don't know what else to say besides the fact that Bloomberg itself deserves all the blame for having a reporter compensation scheme that rewards article's that "move the market". https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensation-2013-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa... It's like a fire chief coming out and saying I don't like the state of our neighbourhood after implementing firefighter pay per size of the fire.

smabie 6y ago
What does that have to do with long articles? Are you suggesting long articles move the market more? Personally, I don't think paying journalists bonuses based on market moves a bad idea. Sure, there's sometimes misaligned incentives, but you could say the same about any compensation scheme.
- xster 6y ago
  Neither the OP or the grandparent or my post had anything to do with long article's. The original premise is mediocre articles.
  - smabie 6y ago
    Yeah but the TFA was mostly about long articles.

mongol 6y ago

That was hilarious, please apply to the position as chief editor!

rapnie 6y ago
I agree, or at least turn this into a 10-page blog post. I'll forgive you the clickbait title.

creaghpatr 6y ago

I think people like to identify with these founders that are being put on a pedestal in these articles, which is why those mundane childhood stories are included. But you're definitely right, after reading a few of these the template gets stale pretty quick.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jandrese 6y ago

One of my favorite subreddits is /r/savedyouaclick where people go through big awful articles like that and summarize the whole thing in a line or two. A surprising number never even answer the question in the title, spending the entire time off on tangents.