Most tech content is bullshit • Hacker News Board

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#341

Post by XelNika » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

I don't think that's true. Lots of global warming sceptics point to some subset of experts who are themselves sceptics. Even subject matter experts have biases. If we ignored those, we'd probably still be unlikely to find many global warming sceptics who had done their own in-depth research. It seems to me that most people in this category (whether it's global warming scepticism, anti-vax, 5G death rays or something else) merely seek to confirm already held beliefs and end up rejecting the opinions of actual experts in favour of misinformation from the kinds of people the blog post is talking about.

Beyond that there are also people with deeper issues than just a disregard for subject matter experts. If you look to extremes (e.g. flat Earth believers), some won't change their mind even when they do the experiments themselves and find proof to the contrary.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#342

Post by cosmodisk » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

DeusExMachina wrote: post #333

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…

Paid tutorials, especially in video format, usually serve different clientele. There's often 'show me how it's done' instead of 'let me figure this out after reading it' mentality.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#343

Post by com2kid » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:43 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…

The Spotify of books is a great way to look at it.

If a publisher had insanely high quality articles on everything, behind a paywall, I'd subscribe to $15 a month pretty quickly.

Every hour saved would pay for itself many times over.

The problem is having a wide enough array of content that such a site becomes the single go to. O'Reilly had that catalog, but I think the tech world had gotten much more complicated since then.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#344

Post by jacobobryant » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

polytely wrote: post #330

jacobobryant wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good to know, any suggestions for making it clearer? Maybe thumbs up/down is the wrong labeling; perhaps something like "show me more like this" and "not interested"... though I have no idea what icons I would use for that.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#345

Post by dredmorbius » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:46 PM UTC

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…

I'm working on a reply to another HNer on just this point.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#346

Post by frequentnapper » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:48 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…

How would the non-experts differentiate between true expertise and self-proclaimed one?

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#347

Post by dredmorbius » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:51 PM UTC

Veen wrote: post #6

Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap. Tech content is no exception. As the article points out, the corollary is that you have to think for yourself, assessing every piece of content you come across.

Since we're arguing by aphorism, Brandolini's law a/k/a bullshit asymmetry principle: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23417790

The value of a healthy established pedagogy, curriculum, and canon is that these distribute the bullshit-sifting role and guard and promote the jems.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#348

Post by jacobobryant » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:51 PM UTC

bartread wrote: post #328

jacobobryant wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

I've thought about that a fair amount also. I think the key is personalization. If bad actors downvoted a bunch of items, it would only affect people who already shared a lot of similar votes with those actors.

That is still exploitable: if I know you like A, B, and C, (perhaps those are popular items), I could also upvote those items and then downvote another item D. I have an idea for countering this: keep track of history. So instead of just measuring ratings overlap ("of items you've both rated, 75% of items were rated the same"), you keep track of the performance of recommendations made from that user ("of Alice's items that we recommended to Bob, Bob upvoted them 25% of the time").

I haven't thought about this super deeply yet, but I think to beat that, you'd have to actually provide valuable data to the system in the first place.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#349

Post by goostavos » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:53 PM UTC

oefrha wrote: post #184

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my experience this is particularly egregious when trying to compare frameworks and libraries in the JS ecosystem. The posts usually boil down to “I wrote a hello world with X and Y, here are my thoughts”, or worse, “I wrote a hello world with X, didn’t even bother to write it with Y, here are my thoughts on why X is awesome and Y sucks”, or worse still, “I wrote a hello world with X, didn’t even bother to write it…

And those exact posts bafflingly make it to the front page of Hacker News somehow -- doubly so if you can include [esoteric language] into your "My thoughts on" title.

I recall an especially egregious one on Clojure where the author had used the language for all of about a week before writing up his detailed hot takes on some "cons" of the language, like needing to know some complicated thing called `let` in order too assign variables.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#350

Post by gregmac » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 9:55 PM UTC

weinzierl wrote: post #256

gregmac wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though I generally prefer reading to watching, I've found in the past few years that YouTube is better for reviews, and I think it's actually because of this. If you don't actually recognize the channel, you can usually tell if it's worthwhile by subscriber count, the other (types of) videos they've posted, and usually just by watching for tens of seconds. Most paid reviews seem to say so (unlike written blogs),…

> Even though I generally prefer reading to watching, I've found in the past few years that YouTube is better for reviews[..] My pet theory why YouTube is better is that there is no incentive to make videos longer. Blog post end up bloated and thin on real information because it is considered good SEO and apparently Google really tends to rank longer articles higher. Same is true for tech books, which are often bloat…

> My pet theory why YouTube is better is that there is no incentive to make videos longer. [...] YouTube videos seem to be mostly as long as they need to be to tell the story they want to tell.

I don't think this is an accident: YouTube apparently ranks based on watch time / retention, so if you make your video too long and people don't watch to the end it hurts you.