4 ms·
Why would banning content farms draw the eye of regulators when the content farms are gaming the search engines? Because search engines fell asleep at the whee
by Detrus 14y ago
Why would banning content farms draw the eye of regulators when the content farms are gaming the search engines?
Because search engines fell asleep at the wheel and now content farms are a sizable chunk of the economy?
And they can always release some features like curated/customized search to weasel around any regulation dangers. Maybe search engines just don't care about the health of the web.
- TeMPOraL 14y ago> Why would banning content farms draw the eye of regulators when the content farms are gaming the search engines? I don't think OP meant content farms. I think he meant half of the sites that have articles repeatedly appearing on HN. All those smaller and bigger "news" services that write a lot of poor, shallow, lying or just plain wrong, controversial articles. The problem is with incentives - they do it for ad money, not to inform/educate people.
- klibertp 14y agoIs it impossible to give people incentive to inform/educate people? I think this even worked for a short while, but I'm no expert on this matter.
- TeMPOraL 14y agoI'm not sure. For what I can tell, it's a difficult and delicate topic, as intrinsic incentives tend to be overrided by extrinsic ones (e.g. pay someone for doing what he loves, he might soon start doing a worse job at it). See the RSA Animate talk about motivation[0]. But hey, we're a clever species, I do believe that someone will figure out how to structure reality so that we get more of the things we really want without using proxy incentives that backfire when overdone. [0] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
- klibertp 14y agoWow. I get a feeling that I saw it before, but I'm happy I got to watch this again. Now, doesn't solution seem obvious? Shouldn't there be a cap on how much you can earn from ads on your site? Just enough "to take the issue of money off the table" and not a cent more? Ok, this really is not my area of expertise. I just feel that what we have now is both unfair to writers and disastrous for society :(
- TeMPOraL 14y ago> Shouldn't there be a cap on how much you can earn from ads on your site? Just enough "to take the issue of money off the table" and not a cent more? It could work for bloggers, but they're not the problem. The "news" services / aggregators / whatever are, and it's hard to put a cap on what a company should earn (I'm not even sure if it is a Right Thing to do). > I just feel that what we have now is both unfair to writers and disastrous for society :( Couldn't say it better myself.
- ladzoppelin 14y agoI agree with the "disastrous for society" part. Information if becoming very hard to verify and I have seen with my own eyes this year the news being censored even from the "fire hose" aggregators like Google news.
- TeMPOraL 14y agoWhat particularly annoys me are the article titles in popular news sites, that often are plain lies (that articles themselves later correct), intended to lure people into viewing full articles. The point is, people don't read all the articles, but they do skim the list of them, and they remember lies from the titles.
- Detrus 14y agoWhat are those sites repeatedly appearing on HN if not content farms? What do you want to call them? They game news aggregation sites and search engines. They push out so much content many users think farm content is normal and upvote it.
- bunderbunder 14y ago> Because search engines fell asleep at the wheel and now content farms are a sizable chunk of the economy? Fell asleep at the wheel? The major search engines run their own ad networks. They're content farms' key customers, and content farms are a core element in their business strategy.
- Detrus 14y agoWell it's hard to say how close the relationship is. Google changed algorithm to target content farms a while ago, caused a stir. They definitely see the problem. The current ad/SEO setup incentives all sites to behave like content farms, duplicating content, quantity over quality, short articles, etc.
- bunderbunder 14y agoI think they're just trying to walk a line. Sort of like how radio stations make a bunch of hubbub about doing blocks of X minutes with no advertisements. It's not because they don't like ads, it's because they've also got to deliver enough of what their audience is looking for to keep them coming back.