Bloomberg chief editor: We publish too many mediocre and long enterprise stories • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by guygurari » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

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.

For recipes I use the Paprika app [1]. I point it at one of these terrible websites and it will scrape out the ingredients and instructions and present them in a useful way.

It doesn’t address the bigger problem but it solves this problem well.

[1] https://www.paprikaapp.com/

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

#152

Post by dang » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

jordanpg wrote: post #150

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.

https://plainoldrecipe.com/

Discussed a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23648864

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

#153

Post by kohtatsu » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 7:15 PM UTC

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.

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.

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

#154

Post by cosmie » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 7:18 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #143

cosmie wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright applies to the literary work as a whole, and protects derivative works based on it[1]. In this case it's true the derivative work (the recipe) wouldn't be copyrightable, but that doesn't absolve it from being considered a copyright violation of the original work. If you can show you independently created that recipe, then you're protected from the above assertion that it was a derivative of that copyrighted…

Aren't prose recipes a kind of program source-code; and aren't the underlying ideas of their steps, algorithms? The law says you can copyright source code, but not a program's underlying algorithmic semantics[1]. What I'm talking about here, is effectively "extracting the semantics of someone else's source code/recipe, in a way where humans are "firewalled off" from the particulars of the original prose of the code/r…

True. But in this case, you'd have to ensure you went through the process of truly re-implementing the algorithm of the recipe, and stripping out all non-algorithmic components of the instructions. For example, a step in an icing recipe[1] may say something like:

Gradually beat in just enough milk to make frosting smooth and spreadable. If frosting is too thick, beat in more milk, a few drops at a time. If frosting becomes too thin, beat in a small amount of powdered sugar. Frosts 13x9-inch cake generously, or fills and frosts an 8- or 9-inch two-layer cake.

The only "algorithmic" component to that step is that you add milk. The fact that you do so gradually, use a beater during the process, how you identify when you've added enough, how to correct for deviations in viscosity of the mixture, etc are all part of the "source code" rather than the algorithm and wouldn't be something you could republish without being considered a derivative work.

The recipe without those contextual components may still be useful for those sufficiently familiar with baking, but for many people following a recipe, they'd likely need such contextual components to follow the recipe successfully.

[1] https://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/vanilla-buttercream-fro...

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

#155

Post by ajmurmann » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 7:20 PM UTC

cosmie wrote: post #131

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.

The SEO implications definitely have a massive influence on it, but it's also a consequence of copyright law. A recipe in and of itself isn't copyrightable, but recipes fluffed up with a bunch of prose may qualify as a literary work and the recipe itself gains copyright protection as a component of that literary work[1]. [1] "How do I protect my recipe?" section of https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html

It happens with other content types as well. When you are looking for help with a video games for example you get perfect, 1-2 sentence answers on Reddit while Google search leads you to extremely long-winded articles that frequently start out even recapping what the game is.

Edit: correct phone autocorrect mistake

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

#156

Post by hyperrail » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 7:22 PM UTC

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 article is a Wall Street Journal A-Hed - one of the WSJ's funny news stories that they run every weekday below the fold of the front page. It takes a while to tell its story because the story is an extended funny anecdote. I doubt it was written that way as overlong clickbait, since you have to go through the strictly enforced (no free meter) WSJ.com subscriber paywall to read it online.

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

#157

Post by ajmurmann » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 7:24 PM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #144

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.

And yet somehow, the top-ranking results for everything seems to be spam that breaks all the rules. I'm constantly disappointed by how ad-infested the search results are. It's really hard to get a direct answer nowadays.

I'd love to have a search engine that heavily penalizes advertisements.

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

#158

Post by ardy42 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 7:25 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #16

dade_ wrote: post #7

Articles in The Economist are usually a better investment of my time. I was originally introduced to the magazine by a teacher in high school, but I've come to learn that many other people weren't as fortunate. https://www.economist.com/

The economist has several things going for it. For one, being a weekly newspaper they only write about things that are worth knowing about a week later. Second, they’d rather have a longer piece with analysis, generalization, and tying Disparate things together than a simple “this is what happened” They are also owned by a foundation so are less subject to the vicissitudes of the markets. The Economist has its limita…

> The economist has several things going for it. For one, being a weekly newspaper they only write about things that are worth knowing about a week later.

IIRC, weekly newsmagazines are pretty much the ideal compromise between timeliness and accuracy: they have far more time to fact-check than a daily paper (and have the luxury of letting things play out a bit more before publication), but aren't dated by (at least) a couple years like your typical book is at publication time.

Too bad they're a dying breed. Another good thing the internet economics killed.

> The Economist has its limitations, blind spots, specific ideology, and such as well.

This is a really fantastic article on those: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/11/liberalism-acc...

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

#159

Post by sct202 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 7:25 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #102

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 get the long content for SEO, but what I don't get is why the recipe isn't right up top. Or there isn't just a link at the top that says "take me to the recipe".

I've only recently noticed that a lot of recipe websites do have those links, but a lot of them are styled like the "share this on X" buttons or very faint that I've been instinctively blind to them for years.

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

#160

Post by derefr » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 7:25 PM UTC

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #126

derefr wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

First-party lead-gen content. YouTube's Chef John (or should I call him AllRecipes' Chef John?) is a shining example.

1. Make entertaining videos of you making the food. These aren't recipes; they're essentially recipe reviews, allowing people to decide whether they want to make this.

2. Share those videos on other channels (Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, your own personal blog, etc.)

3. Link, from the video, and in those channels, to the clean-and-simple no-nonsense standalone recipe page.

(AllRecipes itself is actually somewhat good, by the criteria I listed. It's semi-structured, is sort of serving-size adjustable, and it prints acceptably. It could be a lot better, though. And, since it's user-generated content — a "social network for recipes" — and provides that free-form "description" field at the beginning of each recipe, recipes there can still fall victim to the same sort of long-winded pseudo-blogging content. Not everyone uses the website "for what it's for", i.e. the strategy described above.)