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Comment by cellularmitosis | Hacker News Reader

I have come to loathe narrative-form journalism, and I think this is why.

Headline: Elon Musk will push people through tubes at 300mph.

Me: Whoa cool, what sort of tech is he going to use to pull that off?

Article body: I sit pensively outside of a rustic cafe with my laptop. The early morning dew is still steaming off of the cobblestones.

Me: close tab

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Narrative-form journalism is ruining the internet.

Me: "This chicken breast I cooked is too dry."

Google Search: how to cook chicken breast

Article Title: 3 Ways To Cook Your Chicken So It's Not So Dry - Inspired by This New York Chef

Article Content: (4 paragraphs telling the story of how they author couldn't cook chicken well, which culminates with an embedded YouTube video of a 10-minute long video produced by an entirely different cooking website with even more extra content in it)

Hmm. The internet created much of it.

Search engines don't like simple straight answers - the page, and site must have "enough" text. Adsense pages have a minimum length, while writers have stretched and stretched to make the weakest pages long enough, with synonyms, ideally with intro, ad, distraction, filler, discussion of last week's recipe, the pan set with affiliate link, and a load or two before you see the key point and leave. If they can squeeze in another 40 words they're allowed another ad block.

Trouble is, there seems little sign that the escalation out of control is peaking... Even though adsense is not quite the blight it once was.

> Search engines don't like simple straight answers

I would say they clearly do - but the people providing the answers don't.

Compare the recent move of Google to provide answers with 0 clicks to the source ("How old is Paul Rudd?", "potato cooking time" both provide answers in the topmost result box for me).

That's google on their own site providing an example of do as I say not as I do. :)

They've always discouraged and penalised sites that do that themselves. The search guidelines always talked up what was needed on a page quantity wise, and discouraged brevity. Adsense brought additional, and longer restrictions, and then assorted SEO recommendations and some snake oil to talk around the subject, include synonyms etc.

All that drove a certain style of writing content for the web that has escalated into a very particular - and easily recognisable - style of waffle. That's almost never what's needed for accuracy, readability or quick answers. Long form journalism for the web is a bastard child of traditional long form journalism and SEO inspired waffle, and probably the most annoying of the lot.

This sounds like StackExchange's raison d'etre.

Hot tip - include "joy of cooking" in the search query and the first result will be the right one.

I cannot express how much gratitude I feel for you.

This is a real issue with search engines these days.

There used to be a time when it was easy to search for a topic, and land on some expert blog explaining the whole thing.

Nowadays, search engines present results from big players, where a journalist, that never came close to the real thing, made up a search engine optimized list of crap.

I now read articles by skipping paragraphs 1 & 2, skimming 3, 4 & 5 for the scraps of necessary intro, reading 6 & 7 for the actual (hopefully) new information, and maybe skim the rest for the odd nugget that fell through. I can sorta see the value of the fluff when looking at an article in a vacuum, but it is plain annoying when so many articles are written this way.

Journalists seem to think they're practicing literature. I don't know where they got that idea.

The New Yorker perhaps? Generally they have a reputation of taking pretention to an artform and judging by their age that may have been influenced by per word payment scales.

It's gonzo journalism [1] which was awesome in its time... 40+ years ago. I agree that it doesn't work most of the time within the context of reading sh*t on the web. However, using some kind of pocket/readlater app w/ wifi turned off on a lazy Saturday morning, it has its merits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzo_journalism

Weeeell. Gonzo journalism was introduced by a guy who claims to have taken epinephrine produced by someone's adrenal glands, just to get high. Sitting on a cafe with your laptop and admiring the morning dew is not quite on the same league of having an interesting experience to write about.

In photography it is practically a steadfast rule that to take interesting photos you need to be in interesting places. Written journalism seems to have the same restriction.

My test: if it's a story being told, it's appropriate. Otherwise, cut to the point.

I really enjoyed this piece, which was long and written as a story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19446237

Haha so true. My mind auto shuts down with an alert alert sound track.

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