Hacker News Reader

Or the incentive to create quality content has diminished since it's become much harder to monetize?

That's an excellent point for searches on new things. But for things that had a lot of existing content, I also find them more and more drowned out.

I think the reason is that Google rewards following it's instructions for mobile, security, etc, and existing quality content is often kept online merely as a donation to the public. Having the incentives of a spammer and following through on every rumored 2% rank improvement is almost a requirement to get near the top results.

I really hope someone working on Google's search algs thinks about this. So, so many incredible sources of information are found on un-optimized pages.

I'd go so far as to say that an optimized page is often an indicia of low quality / unoriginal content.

Was it ever easier to monetize? AFAIR good content was always free. If content is created only out of monetary incentive it's rarely good.

Yeah, fair point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com