Most tech content is bullshit • Hacker News Board

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#51

Post by PragmaticPulp » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 5:20 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…

> 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.

Not only this, but the most accurate business advice tends to be too boring to attract views and clicks anyway.

Link-sharing sites favor controversial opinions and stances that make the reader feel superior to their peers, so that's what the content producers deliver.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#52

Post by Fezzik » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #40

exolymph wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, IANAL is common across the entire know-it-all internet, which is basically everyone who can read at a college level and plenty who can't.

I've never seen it outside of HN personally

IAAL, who also frequents many Magic: The Gathering subreddits, and it is used all the time there. Same with the home-repair subs I lurk on. It is ubiquitous shorthand.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#53

Post by raspyberr » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

As are recipes. I don't understand why recipe blog writers want to be seen so much that they're willing to compromise their content. It's just a bunch of bullshit to pad out for SEO and then at the end the actual recipe.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#54

Post by ch_sm » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #3

To be fair, any writing that is labeled "content" is indeed bullshit.

Weirdly, the word "content" for articles or other media seems to actually devalue the content of the piece in lieu of its marketing value. Great stuff. They’ll have to come up with a new word for this practice pretty soon, as more people realize that they’re reading fancy ads instead of actual content.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#55

Post by delaynomore » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

w1nter wrote: post #8

What’s more, I think the incentives are not aligned. People who write content nowadays don’t usually have the reader in mind, but instead focus on promoting something (a tech, a tool, or their personal brand): https://angryscript.home.blog/2020/05/08/in-2020-all-content...

>...personal brand... This. Unfortunately it appears that these days if you want to get ahead in your career is to publish content and develop that "personal brand".

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#56

Post by enraged_camel » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 5:23 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…

>> 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.

I can't really agree with this. I think it's worth noting that writing about something you have just learned is a really good way to solidify that knowledge, especially if you are able to get feedback from others. So a lot of people deliberately set aside the time to do it, even if it comes at the expense of greater levels of productivity.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#57

Post by dgb23 » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #13

From personal experience, including reading a lot of HN, I think programmers as a species are especially biased towards putting forth opinions in the hopes of being validated for our experience or intelligence, even when we know we don't know much about the subject. The fact that IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) [but...] is a common enough statement in these circles to deserve its own acronym is telling. We often throw out…

I’m not a psychologist but...

No, in all seriousness I think this is one true factor. But I feel like this isn’t a bad thing on its own. The issue arises when authors don’t disclose their knowledge or competence. Saying stuff like: this is what I assume, this us what I don’t know etc. or just posing plain questions.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#58

Post by PragmaticPulp » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

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 source code files embedded as GitHub gists one file at a time. I just want to skip to the documentation and get to work.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#59

Post by raverbashing » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

Agreed

The "most popular" (and maybe click-bait like) the content, the more crap you'll get. Especially when people think they know the subject but they don't.

Most common offender nowadays: ML and Data Science. I've found articles with glaring errors, techniques that don't make sense, very shallow tutorials, etc (Disclaimer: nobody is immune from making mistakes, not even me)

And then you get "oh but you start training and then your loss go to zero, right?! This means it works, right?" Yeah. No.

If your training loss goes to zero, your are probably overfitting or the problem you're trying to solve is too simple. If your testing loss goes to zero, you're probably doing something wrong. Or my favourite: your loss is very low but what you're trying to predict has result A 99% of the time and result B 1% of the time. What's your loss if you only predict result A?

I mean, if even the myths about /dev/random and /dev/urandom keep circulating around, can you imagine about other stuff?

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#60

Post by fxtentacle » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

I believe this all started with the advise to write blogs and books to market yourself as an authority.

As a result, nowadays, most blog posts are written by people who are seeking a job in that area, not by people who have experience working in that area.

I mean I'm sure that I would have experience about different topics. But I rarely have the time to write about it. Customers and their projects keep getting in the way.

So if someone has time to write one 2000 word blog post every 2 days, ask yourself: Why does that person have so much time for writing? Aren't they working?