Most tech content is bullshit • Hacker News Board

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#321

Post by habosa » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

I don't think people realize how much hyper-focused tech content is out there these days. I work in developer relations (at Firebase) so I see a lot more of it than an average person.

There are entire channels devoted to making YouTube videos that show you how to solve a very specific error message for a certain combination of Framework X and Library Y.

This content is obviously great for SEO but the people making it often record it 30 seconds after finding the solution themselves and because it's video it can't be maintained, it just rots.

Often I'll get to work in the morning and see 5 new GitHub issues where people are making the same hyper-specific mistake. Why? They are all misled by the same new blog post or video.

That said, I love how passionate developers are about teaching each other. No other industry shares knowledge as rapidly, excitedly, and broadly as we do. Even if there's a lot of bullshit, I find the whole scene very energizing.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#322

Post by habosa » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

leetrout wrote: post #34

I’ve said this for a long time: The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work. Of course there are exceptions but I’m extremely skeptical of a lot of stuff I read. Also that the HN bubble will always make readers feel behind when in reality 90% of the industry hasn’t even begun to catch-up. I felt behind with K8S in 20…

I know many people who do great work and talk about it. The work is hard and getting to speak about it at a conference or write a well-received blog post is their preferred kind of reward.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#323

Post by TeMPOraL » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

tuyguntn wrote: post #33

anthony_romeo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or those fake how-to tutorial pages. Often when I’m looking up, say, error codes in Windows, I need to wade through pages of “Step 1: Download the MyNewFreeComputerCleaner.biz app”

after working at couple of startups, I also noticed worrying trend. * 21 years old marketer writing about life crisis in 40s * fashion blogger explaining is Teflon harmful or not (come on, fashion and chemistry?) * 18 years old student who never immigrated to another country or studied abroad writing about how difficult is immigrant life and what to look for in different country and many more similar content.

That's content marketing. It's the poster child of bullshit. If the people from your examples actually wrote their pieces, it's already above average. In my experience, from working a desk away from a few social media marketers, the usual case is copy-pasting from other blogspam on the same topic.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#324

Post by ghaff » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #236

mrisoli wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems very common in JS land, I once saw a talk in a conf which seemed very basic, later on I stumbled onto a tweet about how the speaker often submits abstracts to CFPs often not knowing much(or at all) about the subject, which serves as motivation to learn and talk about it, works well after having a track record of speaking at events some conferences you can get invited or not have to prove yourself so much t…

It takes quite a lot of time to prepare talk and it is not like they would pay all that impressively. So I think that repeated talks and intro talks are to be expected. Through I did not mind them, I used them to get idea about new thing X while I have time set aside for learning.

>It takes quite a lot of time to prepare talk and it is not like they would pay all that impressively.

Most tech events don't in general pay for speakers or any travel. (Keynotes, scholarships, etc. are among the sometimes exceptions.)

I rarely literally re-use a presentation slide for slide but many presentations I give are based on an earlier presentation I gave. In most cases, a different conference is going to be a mostly different audience. In general, it doesn't make a lot of sense to just dump a presentation because I gave it once to a couple hundred peop,e.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#325

Post by runawaybottle » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #74

tuyguntn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

after working at couple of startups, I also noticed worrying trend. * 21 years old marketer writing about life crisis in 40s * fashion blogger explaining is Teflon harmful or not (come on, fashion and chemistry?) * 18 years old student who never immigrated to another country or studied abroad writing about how difficult is immigrant life and what to look for in different country and many more similar content.

About 5 years ago I attended a local code meetup and someone gave a presentation about this new TypeScript thing. He basically just explained the basic syntax, concepts. etc. A bit boring, but not the worst I've seen. Then in the Q&A someone asked a "In our experience, we've had problems with X, what's your take?" (I've forgotten what X was specifically), and the guy replied with "well, actually, we haven't really us…

The bigger question would be why didn’t that person feel any shame in giving that presentation?

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#326

Post by andreilys » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

rapind wrote: post #311

whack wrote: post #279

Call me a cynic, but the whole "think critically and figure it out for yourself" solution is inefficient at best, harmful at worst. Global warming skepticism is exactly the kind of thing that often occurs when people trust their own judgement more than that of subject matter experts. There are very effective ways to get high quality recommendations, with minimal effort on your part. Want to get good medical advice? F…

Many of us were told growing up that we were a special snowflake. Not sure there's correlation (not sure how you'd prove it), but I have my suspicions. IMO we're in the age of individualism. Hopefully it's just a cycle. The real kicker is it seems to be self-fulfilling. If experts are no longer trusted or respected, the market / margin for expertise shrinks. You get lots of self-proclaimed experts to fill in the gaps…

You can always rely on the Lindy effect in times like these. Except for technical books, I try not to read any book that have been published in the last 20 years.

Old books that are still read will continue to be relevant while the current NYT best seller is more likely to fall into obscurity.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#327

Post by runawaybottle » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #113

jcims wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can barely speak in front of a crowd on something I’ve got 20 years experience in.

This is still something I really can't wrap my mind around. What is the key difference in early life between people who will speak authoritatively regardless of competence, across the spectrum to experts who can't or won't? I don't think Dunning-Kruger explains it because it's not like every shy expert used to be a gregarious beginner.

It’s called being shameless. I hate to be that one sentence reply, but why beat around the bush here?

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#328

Post by bartread » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

jacobobryant wrote: post #233

bartread wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe part of problem is Google SEO. This and the fact that Google search is actually as dumb as a sackful of hammers. Don't get me wrong, for the longest time Google's results were "good enough", but Google has no real concept of the quality of a result (they've tried and it worked for a while - e.g., PageRank). Still, fundamentally their algorithms aren't smart enough to figure out whether any given piece of…

> Logically then, the time is ripe for a new search engine to disrupt but the problem - that of determining intrinsic worth - is really hard to solve, so as yet nobody has I'm sort-of trying to solve this with a recommender system approach.[1] Search isn't my primary objective; I'm mainly focusing on the case where you want to be made aware of relevant information on an ongoing basis but you aren't necessarily lookin…

Interesting. I'd thought about some sort of meta-search service running over Google, Bing, etc., and aggregating results, that was tied in with some way of rating recommending URLs.

I've never got around to doing it and one of the reasons (excuses) is that I haven't yet figured out a way to stop bad actors exploiting it by, e.g., mass downvoting URLs of competitors. I did think about some sort of moving average, or bias toward more recent votes, which would at least somewhat mitigate against transient actions of this kind, but it's harder to deal with a sustained attack like this.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#329

Post by gonza » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

I agree that is difficult to find good blog posts/tutorials on technical stuff. When I want to learn something for the first time, I usually go through the docs and if they aren't friendly enough (for me) to read them and learn, I go and google a nice book about the topic. That being said, there are a lot of nice blog posts about technical stuff, not tutorials/teaching but actual experiences/opinions, people sharing and documenting what they learnt. I appreciate those.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#330

Post by polytely » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

jacobobryant wrote: post #318

polytely wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick question about findka, Is the idea to only upvote/downvote things you have actually experienced and liked or dislike, or do you also upvote/downvote things you don't know but like or dislike? I would think the first case would result in way better data (which is why (I think) last.fm recommendation system is so good), but the latter case seems to be the natural thing to do, humans love to judge shit without act…

Mainly the former. Ideally you've experienced the things you've rated, but in many cases you can probably judge fairly accurately if you're interested in something based on a short description. That brings up a key point which I'm not sure is clear to users or not: voting on items specifically means "this is/is not a good recommendation for me". It's not a judgment on the goodness of the item in general. So if findka…

I think that is not really communicated in the current design, reminds me of the ratings on Netflix where they are intended as "Our estimation of this contents rating for you based on your viewing history" while most people I talked about it just thought it was the rating of the thing in itself.