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Blogwashing

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Re: Blogwashing

#91

Post by johnchristopher »

mikepurvis wrote: post #56
code_duck wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have missed so much media over the past 20 years that I operate like this. I'm not concerned with whether music or games are new or not. Media that came out 5 or 15 years ago is just as new to me as something that came out this year, and there's a much larger selection.

There's a whole community of video gamers who do this: https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/ Cost is the most obvious motivator, but for me it's more about filtering for quality in order to best allocate my limited adult gaming hours— why sink the time and money into a just-released title that might turn out to be the next Anthem or Fallout 76, when you can wait a few years about pick it up for $10-15 once it's a k…

There are drawbacks though https://xkcd.com/606/ if your friends are gamers ^^.

And doesn't work as well with mmorpgs or online games.

Re: Blogwashing

#92

Post by Enginerrrd »

dredmorbius wrote: post #88
swalsh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I'm looking for a book, I usually look for older but still popular books. New but highly rated books are hit or miss, but those old ones that people still recommend have consistently been great reads.

No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always at hand and busily engag…

>No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously

I feel this way about math books a lot actually, especially calculus. When we really formalized the foundations of calculus using limits and epsilon delta arguments in proofs (instead of alternatives like Non-standard analysis see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_analysis) I feel like a great deal of the intuition that actually built calculus was lost. I call it "differential reasoning", and I wish there was a class in just such a thing, formalized with operator theory and non-standard analysis techniques. It's still used a lot in physics but no one talks about the concept of a "ratio of differentials" in modern calculus.

Re: Blogwashing

#93

Post by zafiro17 »

Prioritizing new content is going to exacerbate a lot of already existing problems with the WWW. I won't echo the already good list of reasons why old content is relevant. But I will point out it will usher in a new era of re-showing you old content that has been repurposed "as new" via minor edits. And it's going to also help convince a growing audience of web surfers that only the latest/greatest is worth knowing about. That in turn puts additional pressure on content producers to obsess endlessly over SEO tricks and gimmicks. In sum, this worsens the user's experience by prioritizing things that benefit Google. And this, of course, should be no surprise to anybody who has watched Google's business decisions over the past 4 or 5 years.

Re: Blogwashing

#94

Post by dredmorbius »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #92
dredmorbius wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always at hand and busily engag…

>No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously I feel this way about math books a lot actually, especially calculus. When we really formalized the foundations of calculus using limits and epsilon delta arguments in proofs (instead of alternatives like Non-standard analysis see:…

In the case of calculus, do you recommend Newton, Leibnitz, or others?

Re: Blogwashing

#95

Post by myrryr »

Oh gods I hate this, when I'm looking for how to get something done on a framework which has gone under big changes, I need to look up the articles within the last 6 months.

But this bullshit makes that really hard.

Re: Blogwashing

#96

Post by rchaud »

This is 100% Google's fault. They discourage both "old content" and "thin content", so guess what happens?

Content writers create posts like "Ultimate Beginnner's guide to X in 2019" articles and just update the post title and "Last updated" metadata each year. Nobody's going to create a brand new guide to building muscle or whatever if the core information doesn't change year to year.

Re: Blogwashing

#97

Post by rchaud »

thrower123 wrote: post #26
geocrasher wrote: post #12

If I wrote an article in 2015 and freshen it up with more relevant links, better writing, or some other thing, is it still published in 2015? Should I re-date it? Am I "gaming" the system by doing that? Or am I notifying my readers (all 3 of them!) that there is fresh content? This is actually a real question from me, and I'd love feedback. I look back on my stuff from a few years ago and the blog posts need fixing u…

Please, for the love of all that is holy, publish new information as a new post, don't silently update old content. You never know when some obscure bit that is contained in the old post that appears to be superseded by new material will turn out to be invaluable. Enough old content disappears from the internet organically.

> publish new information as a new post, don't silently update old content.

But the new post likely wouldn't rank as well as the old post, so you are less likely to find it using search. It would be a better user experience if the original post had a clear indicator stating that it was updated with new information on X date.

Re: Blogwashing

#98

Post by rchaud »

bagacrap wrote: post #44
pjc50 wrote: post #2

Not a particularly detailed post and, as it says, it's an old SEO trick. But if people want an answer as to why the blogosphere is dead and everything's on centralised silos: this is why. Any decentralised system that doesn't take spamfighting into account from the beginning will drown under it as soon as it becomes popular.

Is the blogosphere dead though? I see links to tons of previously unknown to me blogs on this site. The community has moderated the spam out. Thanks guys!

It is "dead" in the sense that you are more likely to comment on the post on a third party site like HN or Reddit. A decade ago the conversation would be happening on the author's site, in the comments section. That died off because bots and click farms flooded comment boxes with spam and chased away legitimate visitors.

Authors of popular blogs didn't want to handle comment moderation, and once they started encouraging discussion directly on FB, Reddit or HN, it was game over.

Re: Blogwashing

#99

Post by wbillingsley »

Frankly, I don't see a problem with this if it is done consciously rather than automatically. *

Usually, I'm interested in currency not recency. If, say, a technical article was written in 2015, I don't exactly care that it was written in 2015 but do care very much whether it's outdated today or not. APIs change, etc. If the blogger has re-dated the article, that suggests they believe it is still current, which is useful information to me.

(* - Caveat: no, I've never redated a blog article myself. But I am only a very infrequent blogger anyway.)

Re: Blogwashing

#100

Post by bsder »

nicoburns wrote: post #3

Honestly, I feel like this is Google's fault. It shouldn't be prioritising new content as much as it does. The best articles are often "classics" from several years ago that haven't changed because they haven't needed to.

> Honestly, I feel like this is Google's fault. It shouldn't be prioritising new content as much as it does.

It is Google's fault, but the fault is that I can't choose.

If I'm looking for something about Beaglebone programming, there is a 90%+ probability that I need it limited to "last 6 months". If I'm looking for something about java.util.concurrent, 10 years old articles are probably just fine.

The fact that I can't make this choice is infuriating.

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