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Do not contribute free work to SO, Wikipedia, or any other site that seeks to replace the web with its own brand. Instead, if you have useful knowledge to share

Do not contribute free work to SO, Wikipedia, or any other site that seeks to replace the web with its own brand. Instead, if you have useful knowledge to share, write it up on your own website. People will find your information using search engines. And when these agglomeration sites dry up, search engines will regain some of their lost usefulness. If you get good at writing you can even get paid for your articles, and the editorial process will make them even more useful for readers. SO, Wikipedia, and the like not only take and use your work for their own purposes, but are bad for the web. Their effect is to move the web away from a distributed network of knowledge under the control of individuals responsible for their words, and toward homogenized, voiceless near-monopolies of information. They are nearly as unhealthy for the web as Twitter and Facebook.

benrbray 6y ago
Wikipedia is bad for the web? Their whole policy is not to editorialize, and instead to provide direct citations to their sources. I often find interesting technical articles by looking at Wikipedia citations. > People will find your information using search engines. This is becoming really difficult, due to blog spam and SEO. I have so much trouble finding good info that I often end my searches with "site:reddit.com". I hoard RSS feeds collected from sites like HN and Reddit because I know if I lose them I'll never be able to find them again.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
This is great advice. The absolute best SEO tip of all time is this: remember what you searched for on Google and couldn’t find a decent answer or link in the first few pages? Now you write that answer or link on your website.
sumanthvepa 6y ago
Strongly agree. I simply post my solutions to my own website. And Google and other search engines do the rest.
Clewza313 6y ago
Both Stack Overflow and Wikipedia are Creative Commons licensed, so they can be reused and remixed freely. Contributing to them may not be optimal if your goal is to maximize your personal brand exposure in search results, but it does serve a greater good, and it's very different from contributing to a locked-down, copyrighted repo like Facebook, Instagram, etc.
politicorific 6y ago
Great post. I would also encourage people to contribute to original project documentation, bug trackers, or mailing lists. It’s unfortunate that Stack Overflow is the first destination people end up going to. I guess it’s to be expected since many projects only offer static pages and offer minimalist code examples. The original poster is lucky that they have a blog and their own platform to voice their opinions.
- leephillips 6y ago
  This is a good point: many open source projects now have their documentation under GitHub, and that provides a great way to make corrections and improvements, as well as expanding the documentation. EDIT: anyone can have their own platform, you don’t need to be lucky. It only costs a few bucks to register a domain, and hosting starts at $0.
cthor 6y ago
It's Wikipedia's fault that search engines are filled with blogspam?
- leephillips 6y ago
  Huh? I really have no idea why you are asking this here. But it is a problem that Wikipedia results take up space on the first page of results, along with advertising, etc.
  - andrewguenther 6y ago
    Why is it a problem for wikipedia to appear on the front page of search results?
    - leephillips 6y ago
      It’s not a major problem, but it’s not optimal; just more stuff to skip over looking for the real results. The thing is, I know there is a Wikipedia article about everything, and if I want to see it, I’ll go there and use their search.
      - andrewguenther 6y ago
        Isn't the objective if a search engine to show you the most relevant result to your search? I find wikipedia results to be my most clicked because they're the most useful. I don't understand how those aren't "real" results.
        leephillips 6y ago
        Well, that’s fine. It sounds like Google is more in tune with how you see things, so their rankings are more relevant for you. I was talking about me (as usual).
arp242 6y ago
I've written a lot of content I never would have otherwise based on "question prompts" from Stack Overflow and the like. I learned a lot from answering questions, as well.
antegamisou 6y ago
I agree and I'm reminded of the not-earliest days of the Internet when blogs with high-quality, bias-free information ranked high up in search results, instead of Wiki's almost monopolized readings.
andrewguenther 6y ago
There's a lot to unpack here, but just to start: How is having search engines be the gatekeepers to knowledge preferable to a community like Wikipedia?
- leephillips 6y ago
  I think this is a good question. Part of my answer is that I’m optimistic about Google being disrupted, in the not-too-distant future, by a search engine with a better idea, just as Google disrupted the existing search engines because pagerank worked better than hand-assembled directories. I think it’s obvious to everyone that Google’s algorithms have not been producing results as useful as they did in the past, for several years now. So I hope that this is an opportunity for the search monopoly to be broken up, by a company with enough capital to implement something better that can scale to a billion sites. Also, we are not entirely dependent on search engines. A domain expert can link to other articles from her articles, and so on...forming something like....a web. But we need to encourage the practice of linking. So many people write now (typical Medium articles, for example) without linking to anything much, as if they are the only ones to have ever thought or written about their topic.
mysterypie 6y ago
> People will find your information using search engines. How I wish that were the case. Content on a personal website--no matter how excellent--will be invisible and nobody will ever see it -- unless you do heroic SEO or get lucky in an inexplicable way. Personal anecdote: I created a website on a particular subject that interests me. I've been told by friends and strangers that it is extremely well written and gives a better explanation of the topic than anything else they've seen (at least during the period when I worked on the site). The site has no analytics, no ads, nothing controversial. Just a clean design with text, diagrams, and photos. Google will not find my site using any appropriate keyword. Not even after pages of search results. But Google has indexed it. If I search for "an exact sentence from the site quoted like this", Google finds it. Self-hosted content in today's web does not survive on merit alone even when it's focused, useful, and free. That's been my experience anyway.
- leephillips 6y ago
  It's hit or miss. I do no SEO either. Some of the articles on my personal site are well represented on Google, and some, as you’ve found, are invisible. You need to be patient. Leave them up there; it could take a few years, but if people link to them, they will appear in results. But people need to do a better job of linking, overall. It’s true that Google, in particular, has gotten much worse in this regard. I know this very well, as my site predates Google and Wikipedia. Just my name used to be on the front page of Google, and many articles on my site. Now, not so much.
- Folcon 6y ago
  Curiosity compels me to ask, what is the website? =)...
mdavis6890 6y ago
I think you're missing perhaps the most important value of Wikipedia to the consumer - the content has been subjected to peer-review and open criticism, and then jointly edited by many people with different perspectives. This causes me (as the consumer) to have a high degree of confidence in the information. This will not be true for any blog post, or even any book. A blog post (like a SO answer) can be higher or lower in search results, but the content of that blog post is still just one person's (or one small group's) perspective.
- leephillips 6y ago
  That’s not what “peer review” means. And what you list as advantages, the joint editing by many people, are also disadvantages. I’m far more interested in reading something with an identifiable author, who is responsible for the words, than the product of a crowd, where any semblance of an individual voice has been suffocated. And you may feel confident in the information, but don’t forget that I can make any Wikipedia article say anything that I want. Sure, it will get fixed. But maybe the version that you read still contained my misinformation.

benrbray 6y ago

Wikipedia is bad for the web? Their whole policy is not to editorialize, and instead to provide direct citations to their sources. I often find interesting technical articles by looking at Wikipedia citations. > People will find your information using search engines. This is becoming really difficult, due to blog spam and SEO. I have so much trouble finding good info that I often end my searches with "site:reddit.com". I hoard RSS feeds collected from sites like HN and Reddit because I know if I lose them I'll never be able to find them again.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

This is great advice. The absolute best SEO tip of all time is this: remember what you searched for on Google and couldn’t find a decent answer or link in the first few pages? Now you write that answer or link on your website.

sumanthvepa 6y ago

Strongly agree. I simply post my solutions to my own website. And Google and other search engines do the rest.

Clewza313 6y ago

Both Stack Overflow and Wikipedia are Creative Commons licensed, so they can be reused and remixed freely. Contributing to them may not be optimal if your goal is to maximize your personal brand exposure in search results, but it does serve a greater good, and it's very different from contributing to a locked-down, copyrighted repo like Facebook, Instagram, etc.

politicorific 6y ago

Great post. I would also encourage people to contribute to original project documentation, bug trackers, or mailing lists. It’s unfortunate that Stack Overflow is the first destination people end up going to. I guess it’s to be expected since many projects only offer static pages and offer minimalist code examples. The original poster is lucky that they have a blog and their own platform to voice their opinions.

leephillips 6y ago
This is a good point: many open source projects now have their documentation under GitHub, and that provides a great way to make corrections and improvements, as well as expanding the documentation. EDIT: anyone can have their own platform, you don’t need to be lucky. It only costs a few bucks to register a domain, and hosting starts at $0.

cthor 6y ago

It's Wikipedia's fault that search engines are filled with blogspam?

leephillips 6y ago
Huh? I really have no idea why you are asking this here. But it is a problem that Wikipedia results take up space on the first page of results, along with advertising, etc.
- andrewguenther 6y ago
  Why is it a problem for wikipedia to appear on the front page of search results?
  - leephillips 6y ago
    It’s not a major problem, but it’s not optimal; just more stuff to skip over looking for the real results. The thing is, I know there is a Wikipedia article about everything, and if I want to see it, I’ll go there and use their search.
    - andrewguenther 6y ago
      Isn't the objective if a search engine to show you the most relevant result to your search? I find wikipedia results to be my most clicked because they're the most useful. I don't understand how those aren't "real" results.
      - leephillips 6y ago
        Well, that’s fine. It sounds like Google is more in tune with how you see things, so their rankings are more relevant for you. I was talking about me (as usual).

arp242 6y ago

I've written a lot of content I never would have otherwise based on "question prompts" from Stack Overflow and the like. I learned a lot from answering questions, as well.

antegamisou 6y ago

I agree and I'm reminded of the not-earliest days of the Internet when blogs with high-quality, bias-free information ranked high up in search results, instead of Wiki's almost monopolized readings.

andrewguenther 6y ago

There's a lot to unpack here, but just to start: How is having search engines be the gatekeepers to knowledge preferable to a community like Wikipedia?

leephillips 6y ago
I think this is a good question. Part of my answer is that I’m optimistic about Google being disrupted, in the not-too-distant future, by a search engine with a better idea, just as Google disrupted the existing search engines because pagerank worked better than hand-assembled directories. I think it’s obvious to everyone that Google’s algorithms have not been producing results as useful as they did in the past, for several years now. So I hope that this is an opportunity for the search monopoly to be broken up, by a company with enough capital to implement something better that can scale to a billion sites. Also, we are not entirely dependent on search engines. A domain expert can link to other articles from her articles, and so on...forming something like....a web. But we need to encourage the practice of linking. So many people write now (typical Medium articles, for example) without linking to anything much, as if they are the only ones to have ever thought or written about their topic.

mysterypie 6y ago

> People will find your information using search engines. How I wish that were the case. Content on a personal website--no matter how excellent--will be invisible and nobody will ever see it -- unless you do heroic SEO or get lucky in an inexplicable way. Personal anecdote: I created a website on a particular subject that interests me. I've been told by friends and strangers that it is extremely well written and gives a better explanation of the topic than anything else they've seen (at least during the period when I worked on the site). The site has no analytics, no ads, nothing controversial. Just a clean design with text, diagrams, and photos. Google will not find my site using any appropriate keyword. Not even after pages of search results. But Google has indexed it. If I search for "an exact sentence from the site quoted like this", Google finds it. Self-hosted content in today's web does not survive on merit alone even when it's focused, useful, and free. That's been my experience anyway.

leephillips 6y ago
It's hit or miss. I do no SEO either. Some of the articles on my personal site are well represented on Google, and some, as you’ve found, are invisible. You need to be patient. Leave them up there; it could take a few years, but if people link to them, they will appear in results. But people need to do a better job of linking, overall. It’s true that Google, in particular, has gotten much worse in this regard. I know this very well, as my site predates Google and Wikipedia. Just my name used to be on the front page of Google, and many articles on my site. Now, not so much.
Folcon 6y ago
Curiosity compels me to ask, what is the website? =)...

mdavis6890 6y ago

I think you're missing perhaps the most important value of Wikipedia to the consumer - the content has been subjected to peer-review and open criticism, and then jointly edited by many people with different perspectives. This causes me (as the consumer) to have a high degree of confidence in the information. This will not be true for any blog post, or even any book. A blog post (like a SO answer) can be higher or lower in search results, but the content of that blog post is still just one person's (or one small group's) perspective.

leephillips 6y ago
That’s not what “peer review” means. And what you list as advantages, the joint editing by many people, are also disadvantages. I’m far more interested in reading something with an identifiable author, who is responsible for the words, than the product of a crowd, where any semblance of an individual voice has been suffocated. And you may feel confident in the information, but don’t forget that I can make any Wikipedia article say anything that I want. Sure, it will get fixed. But maybe the version that you read still contained my misinformation.