Most tech content is bullshit • Hacker News Board

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#331

Post by hardwaregeek » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

There's a particular brand of young developer where every opinion comes from a blog post, talk or HN comment. They have strong views on many different topics and believe that they're knowledgeable and smarter than the average developer^[1].

The only issue? They don't have actual experience to back this up. Because not only is most tech content bullshit, the small percentage that isn't BS may not apply to their situation. You may not be working on soft real time systems. You may not be working with big data. You may not be running a company.

I should know—I'm certainly guilty of assuming that because I read about software development, I'm a better software developer. When really there's a big big big difference between reading about development and actually practicing the craft. Especially if you've only been programming casually. There's a massive difference between writing code for fun and writing code that needs to be a value-add for the company.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Bear

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#332

Post by anoncake » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

azeirah wrote: post #183

Swizec wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a programmer with some 20 years of experience who likes to write tutorials on original research and techniques — you can pry my animated gifs out of my cold dead fingers! All my life I waited for broadband to be widespread enough to write articles with rich embedded animations. And yes, sometimes they only serve the purpose of entertainment or emotional tone setting. Other times they’re actual part of the content.…

Go you! I love high quality written content with a lighter tone. I find it incredibly difficult to focus on dry tests because of my ADHD.

Me too, especially when they're accompanied by moving pictures.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#333

Post by DeusExMachina » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:25 PM UTC

tonystubblebine wrote: post #127

Good is hard. When I left O'Reilly Media in 2005 we were just ending a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. And everyone at O'Reilly could see that their business was being eaten away by free. Stack Overflow didn't exist yet but we could feel it coming. At the time, we hoped that UGC would have some sort of wisdom of the crowd thing that would lead to high quality…

I make a living selling iOS development courses at high prices, so I can tell you that the we didn't lose the paid ecosystem.

I can't talk about book publishers like O'Really, and probably the market for books shrank. But I have several competitors that sell self published ebooks.

The plethora of free content you find online is not always a good thing for everyone. As the author of the article says, most tech content is bullshit. Most people don't care, but there are plenty of people that realize that and are willing to pay.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#334

Post by bryanrasmussen » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

a propos this I just thought of a writer who I used to follow at the beginning of the millennium. I'm not going to mention their name, and I think their articles were not bullshit per se, but... whenever I downloaded the code for his longer articles and tried to run it locally there were always lots of bugs (although to be fair I only did this for the really complicated things he wrote and only 3-4 times)

Just crazy that I would spend hours working on it to get it to work, I was always weirded out by it. This guy was sort of famous. Smaller bits of code were always fine and he had some pretty cogent insights on things, but big bits of code was just not working without significant rewrites.

To be fair perhaps this was a different time and things not working reliably was more widespread, I reemmber this article I wrote for SitePoint in 2008 https://www.sitepoint.com/rewrite-web-chickenfoot/ (please excuse me if too much bullshit, but I was less old) got a remark from the editor that testing took longer than normal, which I was of course surprised by because such is the time-honored reaction of a programmer when the code works on their own machine.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#335

Post by donmcronald » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:31 PM UTC

tonystubblebine wrote: post #127

Good is hard. When I left O'Reilly Media in 2005 we were just ending a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. And everyone at O'Reilly could see that their business was being eaten away by free. Stack Overflow didn't exist yet but we could feel it coming. At the time, we hoped that UGC would have some sort of wisdom of the crowd thing that would lead to high quality…

I think part of the problem is that publishers did a bad job of pricing their digital products and missed an opportunity to increase sales volume. In my opinion they got greedy thinking they could increase volume and prices at the same time, so digital products were priced way too high.

I had a Safari Books subscription for a little while, but I got rid of it. I can't remember the exact pricing, but IIRC it was around $250 / year for the cheap option that let me "borrow" 10 books a month. The problem for me was that I'd typically buy 2-3 books per year ($100-$150) and I owned more than 10 books total, so the subscription seemed like a bad deal by comparison. The "unlimited" (with limited downloads IIRC) was $500+ / year. That's a lot of books.

O'Reilly could have been the Spotify of tech books, but old school publishers were too scared to reassess their pricing. When the cost of distribution plummets, but results in a worse (ie: more expensive), product for your customers, it's not a shock to see those businesses struggle IMO, especially when the competition is free and "good enough".

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#336

Post by ProZsolt » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:33 PM UTC

azemetre wrote: post #290

jjice wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems kind of like the video game crash of 1983[0]. A flood of low quality content that begins to drown out the high quality content. One of the best things about the internet is that anyone can create and publish what they want. One of the worst parts about the internet is that anyone can create and publish what they want. I'm a big fan of books because that is where a lot of experts seem to prefer to publish their…

What are some high quality books you’d recommend that are somewhat recent (last ten years)? The only ones I can say, that I’ve also read, are YDKJS and Secrets JavaScript Ninja (work in web, but willing to read anything, good information is good information regardless of the tech).

Pro Git, Coders at Work both are ~10 years old. A recent one is Site Reliability Engineering published in 2016

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#337

Post by bartread » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:34 PM UTC

jason0597 wrote: post #299

tomxor wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't get is how SEO isn't countered by unvisiting... By which I mean navigating back to the google search, I always assumed that would be a clear indicator to google that it's not what the user was looking for. Maybe this does happen but it not weighted highly enough against SEO.

A lot of times I middle click any interesting links I find on Google, in which case it becomes hard for Google to know if I unvisited a site. It's not like they can track me clicking the Back button on my browser and arriving back to the search results

I've no idea whether they do this or not but it's easy enough to know when a tab or window is focussed or not. I have a games site and use this to pause/unpause games, music, etc.

They could hook this into Google Analytics and subtract the time you spent with that tab/window not focussed from your session duration.

I do fundamentally agree that session duration may not be the worst proxy for worthwhile content or, at least, engaging content, snd I think Google may use it as such.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#338

Post by xfer » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC

donmcronald wrote: post #335

tonystubblebine wrote: post #127

Good is hard. When I left O'Reilly Media in 2005 we were just ending a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. And everyone at O'Reilly could see that their business was being eaten away by free. Stack Overflow didn't exist yet but we could feel it coming. At the time, we hoped that UGC would have some sort of wisdom of the crowd thing that would lead to high quality…

I think part of the problem is that publishers did a bad job of pricing their digital products and missed an opportunity to increase sales volume. In my opinion they got greedy thinking they could increase volume and prices at the same time, so digital products were priced way too high. I had a Safari Books subscription for a little while, but I got rid of it. I can't remember the exact pricing, but IIRC it was aroun…

Also for selling digital goods regional pricing plays a big role in my opinion. Part of the reason why steam is so hugely successful.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#339

Post by cosmodisk » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC

tonystubblebine wrote: post #127

Good is hard. When I left O'Reilly Media in 2005 we were just ending a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. And everyone at O'Reilly could see that their business was being eaten away by free. Stack Overflow didn't exist yet but we could feel it coming. At the time, we hoped that UGC would have some sort of wisdom of the crowd thing that would lead to high quality…

A lot of that free content is not just wrong but also convoluted to extremes. I was reading about roles in Asp.net. After watching a few videos, reading a few articles, including the ones from Microsoft,I was none the wiser. Then I pulled out a book I bought a few years ago and it turns out it had a section on about roles.The guy explained the whole thing in just few pages and in a way that even a donkey would understand,while all those websites were showing some unnecessary complexity. I bought some technical books, including some classics and it's so refreshing compared to all that junk on Medium.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#340

Post by AlexCoventry » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #58

tuyguntn wrote: post #4

I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but marketing content is even more bullshit. I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on. Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content,…

Personal brand building is another major contributor to search engine content dilution. Whenever I Google for something in hot new languages or frameworks, I have to sift through 10s of Medium articles from beginner developers who are trying to establish themselves as industry experts. I don't want to read some junior developer's Medium post full of animated GIFs and a pseudo-tutorial that is really just entire sourc…

Yes, this is happening even at the code level, resulting in a flood of modules/packages with shallow capabilities.