Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WikiHow’s art is made by a network of freelancers, mostly in the Philippines

onezero.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 101 posts

Re: WikiHow’s art is made by a network of freelancers, mostly in the Philippines

#91

Post by wildrhythms »

puranjay wrote: post #29
flanbiscuit wrote: post #4

Blocked reading the article because medium wants me to sign in. Is Medium now forcing people to create accounts to read posts or is it just a setting that this subdomain turned on?

Medium is quickly going down the Quora path for me. The content quality is becoming poorer as more and more people use it as a place to dump their zero-traffic blog posts. The aggressive content gating and pop-ups are another Quora-esque introduction. Just a case of being blinded by metrics. Adding an aggressive sign-up form might get you more emails and sign-ups, but it will also annoy away better quality users.

I had a Lyft driver trying to explain to me how they’re going to make it big on Medium. I still am not sure what they write about or how exposure on Medium works, but they were convinced that it was THE place to blog. I could only politely nod and smile thinking about how often I saw that obnoxious user hostile popover.

Re: WikiHow’s art is made by a network of freelancers, mostly in the Philippines

#93

Post by dang »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #4

Blocked reading the article because medium wants me to sign in. Is Medium now forcing people to create accounts to read posts or is it just a setting that this subdomain turned on?

Please don't post like this. It's off topic and such threads are always the same. And users usually post workarounds in the thread, as they did in this one.

This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Re: WikiHow’s art is made by a network of freelancers, mostly in the Philippines

#95

Post by ringzero »

vbtemp wrote: post #72
drewbug01 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wikihow is a cancer on the internet, clogging google and google image results with inane how-to guides .for the purpose of generating ad revenue. It is not just that the guides are bad but they are engaging in keyword spamming by creating guides for things that don't even make sense [citation needed] But, seriously - you're alleging that they're a content farm. Can you substantiate that at all? Because from where I…

> wikihow is a cancer on the internet, clogging google and google image results with inane how-to guides This 100x over. I've been trying to find a convenient way to block the domain from all my devices. It's all just utterly content-free cyber squatting.

Does the content on wikihow not deliver on what it promises to do? And if so, have you considered editing it - given that it’s a wiki?

Of the things destroying the internet (Google AMP, and Pinterest, in that order), I wouldn’t include wikihow.

Re: WikiHow’s art is made by a network of freelancers, mostly in the Philippines

#96

Post by notatoad »

ringzero wrote: post #95
vbtemp wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wikihow is a cancer on the internet, clogging google and google image results with inane how-to guides This 100x over. I've been trying to find a convenient way to block the domain from all my devices. It's all just utterly content-free cyber squatting.

Does the content on wikihow not deliver on what it promises to do? And if so, have you considered editing it - given that it’s a wiki? Of the things destroying the internet (Google AMP, and Pinterest, in that order), I wouldn’t include wikihow.

No, the content on wikiHow does not deliver. It promises to help you learn how to do something, and I have never successfully used a wikiHow article to learn how to do anything. The content is so low-quality as to be useless.

And "it's a wiki" isn't a defense. What is my motivation to improve it? Nobody trusts wikiHow anyways, so contributing would just be creating more content that nobody should trust.

Re: WikiHow’s art is made by a network of freelancers, mostly in the Philippines

#98

Post by drewbug01 »

tehjoker wrote: post #78
drewbug01 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fantastic that you don't need the article. I'm sure you also don't really need this article: https://www.wikihow.com/Tie-Your-Shoes Have you considered that there might be people who would find that article on "being random" interesting or helpful? Consider just for a moment, the perspective of someone who isn't what we'd call "neuro-typical" - someone with an ASD, for example. Such an article might be incredibly use…

I find the content and art on the site really cute and heartwarming and occasionally useful, so thanks! There are so many memes on Twitter that use a funny wikiHow image.

Then this may be of interest to you: https://www.redbubble.com/people/wikihow/shop

Re: WikiHow’s art is made by a network of freelancers, mostly in the Philippines

#99

Post by drewbug01 »

notatoad wrote: post #96
ringzero wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the content on wikihow not deliver on what it promises to do? And if so, have you considered editing it - given that it’s a wiki? Of the things destroying the internet (Google AMP, and Pinterest, in that order), I wouldn’t include wikihow.

No, the content on wikiHow does not deliver. It promises to help you learn how to do something, and I have never successfully used a wikiHow article to learn how to do anything. The content is so low-quality as to be useless. And "it's a wiki" isn't a defense. What is my motivation to improve it? Nobody trusts wikiHow anyways, so contributing would just be creating more content that nobody should trust.

“What is my motivation to improve it” is an excellent question in my opinion, and worthy of discussion. I don’t know if I have an answer to it, but I do know that there isn’t really another Wikihow-like place out there that’s better. So at least my default answer would be “improve it because it’s better than starting from scratch.”

I do overall disagree with the thrust of your comment, though: your anecdote and mine cancel each other out. You haven’t been helped; I have! On balance I think they are helpful. I don’t have access to the statistics anymore but from what I remember, more people interacting with the website rated articles positively than not.

Re: WikiHow’s art is made by a network of freelancers, mostly in the Philippines

#100

Post by notatoad »

drewbug01 wrote: post #99
notatoad wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the content on wikiHow does not deliver. It promises to help you learn how to do something, and I have never successfully used a wikiHow article to learn how to do anything. The content is so low-quality as to be useless. And "it's a wiki" isn't a defense. What is my motivation to improve it? Nobody trusts wikiHow anyways, so contributing would just be creating more content that nobody should trust.

“What is my motivation to improve it” is an excellent question in my opinion, and worthy of discussion. I don’t know if I have an answer to it, but I do know that there isn’t really another Wikihow-like place out there that’s better. So at least my default answer would be “improve it because it’s better than starting from scratch.” I do overall disagree with the thrust of your comment, though: your anecdote and mine…

the wikihow-like place that's better is the entire internet. It contains more useful information than wikihow does (by definition, because it contains wikihow).

wikihow could be valuable if the content it contained had some generally assumed level of authority that was better than the internet at large, so you could assume that a wikihow article was more trustworthy than any other random result from google. as long as wikihow articles can't be assumed to be more helpful than any other google search result, google is a superior alternative to wikihow.

Post reply on HN