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Comment by Jach | Hacker News Reader

Just be honest with your readers by stating your level of expertise when you're putting material out there, whether it's a blog or a book. Besides, even if we got rid of the 1000s of garbage quality tutorials, there would still be 1000s of expert quality tutorials that are nevertheless worthless because technology has moved on and made them obsolete. Of all the many books and blogs published around technology each year, very few will be relevant the next year, let alone make it to timeless classic status.

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But that still fills search engine results with garbage I have to filter through. It's hard enough searching for solutions to problems when there's five StackOverflow answers with full of bad data and incorrections scattered through the comments, answers, and comments on answers.

Exactly. Bad and/or wrong is worse than nothing at all.

Not the writer or publisher's problem imo.

It's also not my problem when I throw my garbage into the river.

Interesting. I don't have any opinion on the incidence rate of low-quality technical tutorials, but I think this is the first time I've seen Google search results analogized as a fragile public good we all have a more-or-less moral responsibility to be good stewards of.

It's absolutely excellent way to frame the problem.

Exactly. No tutorial claims to teach you EVERYTHING about the subject. A tutorial is a light weight introduction to a topic.

You're using it wrong if you expect it to be prod grade. New comers have a big task of understanding the language & framework. Writing "prod" worthy things is the last thing on their minds

this is why (esp w/ js) I always use the google search w/in the past year feature. When looking for src code for ideas on ghub, I always sort by last updated or most starred but make sure the ones I check have been updated in past year... etc... Standards change so fast, and I feel coding is getting 'better' in terms of processes, that doing it like they did in 2015 is a step back sometimes, plus js itself has changed a lot, so has laravel, and other frameworks. Always good to get the latest data on something.

As a side note, I've found some 'gems' from tutorials that I knew were shitty novices or intermediate devs at best just writing to expand their career or do inbound marketing or something, but they made me think about a solution to something differently, or they touched on something I didn't know anything about, having never done it before like some api or auth system.

TLDR: I think with all tutorials it's buyer beware - especially coding tutorials, filter by date, don't expect perfect 10x dev tips unless you're on egghead, laracasts, railscasts, pluralsight (some other coding mooc that claims master level expertise), and if you write posts as a jr/intermediate dev, maybe try coming back to them when you 'level up' and make them better/more relevant.

Definitely agree with your tldr, there's some responsibility on the reader side as well. Even when authors don't declare their expertise, the context of the information, which might just be its age, can often be enough. You should know what you're getting when you read and take examples from the old PHP doc commenters, for instance.

I was setting up emacs + evil mode the other night to give it a real spin for the first time, one blog post from 2014 was pretty helpful but I suspected I'd have to throw out a bunch of things (if they worked at all) as I got further along and learned more about the ecosystem. Sure enough the way people add packages has changed, but this blog author helpfully updated the post in 2016 with the new information (and left the marked-as-old info there for context).

Yeah, part of becoming a better coder, is learning to scan through the 'chaff' to get to the good stuff. I'll usually open 5 different articles at once, scan em, see what applies to my situation the best, which one seems to 'know' their stuff better, etc...

One reason I hate video tutorials -- I don't want to sit through 30 minutes to figure out the 20 second tidbit I need to know, I don't even read 50% of blog posts I just scan it for what I want and go... lol

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