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Bloomberg chief editor: We publish too many mediocre and long enterprise stories

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Re: Bloomberg chief editor: We publish too many mediocre and long enterprise stories

#121

Post by bredren »

paul-alkhimov wrote: post #99
MR4D wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bizarre thought just hit me. What if they are correct, and stumbled onto the same trail the FBI has, and the FBI gave them an order to not discuss it anymore due to a pending investigation with national security repercussions? Given how BB has just walked away from this article - no rescinding, no nothing, I think it's a possibility.

sorry, but it sounds like a conspiracy theory

Because it is. It has been proposed though. I think the only way this could be true is if Tim Cook and many security folks at Apple either failed to detect the exploit, or they did and are all "in on it" and essentially lying about adherence to a core company value.

The requirement of perfect secrecy and vast involvement in a lie is what typically weakens conspiracy theories as not realistic.

Re: Bloomberg chief editor: We publish too many mediocre and long enterprise stories

#122

Post by josh2600 »

derefr wrote: post #108
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've always wondered why someone isn't going around taking other people's SEO-fluffed recipes and just re-formatting them onto standalone fluff-less pages, with good, standardized formatting: • an ingredients table rather than an ingredients list (i.e. where quantity, unit, and ingredient name are columns; and quantity is right-aligned, like any other numeric column in Excel); with sensible units that don't assume th…

Serious Eats is about as close as I've come to a site like this.

Re: Bloomberg chief editor: We publish too many mediocre and long enterprise stories

#123

Post by tdeck »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #78
greatgib wrote: post #36

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 introduc…

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.

I hate this! The worst part is they often include a trimmed down version of the recipe up top that leaves out key info, so you think "oh this recipe is no good" but then the real recipe is at the bottom past the author's life story and commentary on the season.

Re: Bloomberg chief editor: We publish too many mediocre and long enterprise stories

#124

Post by bfdm »

jedberg wrote: post #114
dariusj18 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you scroll that's more opportunities to show you ads.

Sure for the sites that show ads. But I'm taking about the ones where they literally just put the story in to rank higher in search results. The ones just doing it to share their recipe.

Same reason, more room to cram ads you have to scroll past to see the actual recipe.

Re: Bloomberg chief editor: We publish too many mediocre and long enterprise stories

#125

Post by akiselev »

puranjay wrote: post #93
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Bloomberg chief editor: We publish too many mediocre and long enterprise stories

#126

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

derefr wrote: post #108
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've always wondered why someone isn't going around taking other people's SEO-fluffed recipes and just re-formatting them onto standalone fluff-less pages, with good, standardized formatting: • an ingredients table rather than an ingredients list (i.e. where quantity, unit, and ingredient name are columns; and quantity is right-aligned, like any other numeric column in Excel); with sensible units that don't assume th…

But how would you find that site in the first place, since it wouldn't be SEO optimized?

Re: Bloomberg chief editor: We publish too many mediocre and long enterprise stories

#127

Post by hef19898 »

Youden wrote: post #65
greatgib wrote: post #36

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 introduc…

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-leav... 1100 words to answer the titular question, which really only needed a paragraph or two.

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.

Re: Bloomberg chief editor: We publish too many mediocre and long enterprise stories

#128

Post by puranjay »

akiselev wrote: post #125
puranjay wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Bloomberg chief editor: We publish too many mediocre and long enterprise stories

#129

Post by cosmie »

derefr wrote: post #108
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've always wondered why someone isn't going around taking other people's SEO-fluffed recipes and just re-formatting them onto standalone fluff-less pages, with good, standardized formatting: • an ingredients table rather than an ingredients list (i.e. where quantity, unit, and ingredient name are columns; and quantity is right-aligned, like any other numeric column in Excel); with sensible units that don't assume th…

> I've always wondered why someone isn't going around taking other people's SEO-fluffed recipes and just re-formatting them onto standalone fluff-less pages, with good, standardized formatting:

Because they'd likely run afoul of copyright laws. A recipe in and of itself doesn't generally qualify for copyright protection, but a recipe cushioned in prose can be a copyrighted literary work. So anyone ripping the recipe out of it would infringe on the copyright of the literary work itself. See "How do I protect my recipe?" on [1].

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html

Re: Bloomberg chief editor: We publish too many mediocre and long enterprise stories

#130

Post by oh_sigh »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #78
greatgib wrote: post #36

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 introduc…

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.

There are extensions which try to extract the recipe out of the page and display it directly.

e.g. for chrome (I don't endorse this, just an example): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...

A problem is that sometimes the bloggers will write modifications or amendments mixed into their prose, and not reference them in the actual recipe instructions (e.g. the recipe calls for 400g of flour, but somewhere in the autobiography, the author says "The recipe calls for 400g but I find 600g to produce a much better end result")

I think, ultimately, one should not google around for recipes from random bloggers, and instead only take recipes from actual cookbooks. When you find a random person's blog, you have no idea what their skill levels are, what their motivations are for writing(usually just to make $$$ via a blog). For example, I ran across a recipe which the end product had raw flour in it, and a commenter on the site said that they should put a warning for pregnant people to not do this, and the blogger came through and said that raw flour is not only not bad for pregnant women, but is actually good for pregnant women, which goes against all known advice from healthcare professionals.

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