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Comment by nakodari | Hacker News Reader

The first half of the article doesn't even name the business. The name of the business, GitLab, is hidden in the second half of the article. This is an example of a publication optimizing blindly for Google Search Optimization where they want to improve "Time on site" and other data by keeping the readers on the page as long as possible. It's frustrating. Google's algorithm needs to be updated to make it smarter otherwise publishers are going to write such articles which will cause a loss of productivity of the readers. Not sure whom to blame here, I guess both Forbes and Google share the blame for this.

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Forbes is a trash publication, living on its historical reputation to vomit SEO spam all over the internet. A good recent example:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/business/media/jeffrey-ep...

“The article on the Forbes website was attributed to Drew Hendricks, a contributing writer. As The Times revealed in an article last week, he was not the author of the piece. Instead, it was delivered to him by a public relations firm, and he said he was paid $600 to attach his byline and post it at Forbes.com.”

That being said, Google absolutely encourages this behavior because Forbes is very often at the top of search results.

Jeez! I never knew submarining had gotten that bad! I always assumed it was “PR firm gives you a bunch of quotes and research, possibly a narrative, and you write it from there.” I never thought it was as transparent as “here’s some money to say you wrote it”.

I was pretty sure "say you wrote it" was an example in the original essay. Though upon review, Graham writes "almost verbatim".

Different publications vary greatly in their reliance on PR firms. At the bottom of the heap are the trade press, who make most of their money from advertising and would give the magazines away for free if advertisers would let them. [2] The average trade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it look like a magazine. They're so desperate for "content" that some will print your press releases almost verbatim, if you take the trouble to write them to read like articles.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

It was the "paying you cash to say you wrote it" that was shocking. Graham's model in the submarine piece was that the PR agencies only "pay" you in the sense of doing your work for you, which is a kind of compensation, but not as distasteful as directly buying the writer's authorship with cash.

>This is an example of a publication optimizing blindly for Google Search Optimization

Many readers don't realize that in 2010, Forbes drastically changed their website to include 1000s of freelance writers. This "contributor model" was put in place by Lewis DVorkin[1].

This is why the quality of articles on Forbes.com is very inconsistent. Other publisher websites have the same problem.[2]

EDIT: add examples to train the eye to the differences:

The following article has "Forbes Staff" as gray text next to author byline: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2019/07/22/the-...

In contrast, this Github article has "Contributor" as gray text next to author byline.

One can also go to the "forbes.com" main landing page and click "Editors' Picks" to see how articles from "Forbes Staff" and "Contributor" are mixed together.

[1] https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2012/what-the-forb...

[2] http://kontrary.com/2011/04/04/the-devolution-of-the-huffing...

The thing with “contributor” articles is there is no editorial oversight. They look at your record when they pick you, but after that you publish directly to Forbes.com. They might as well be blogs.

I noticed this when you google "name-of-movie post credit scene". Not a single result will instantly tell you if this movie has a scene after the credits. It will have a multiple paragraph review of the movie and your answer is hidden somewhere in there. All I want is a simple yes or no answer.

I found the main discussion threads on the /r/movies surbeddit the easiest way of finding if there's a post credit scene. The info is in the original post, so there's no need to read comments with potential spoilers.

http://aftercredits.com is a pretty good source as well, but I checked it out after your comment and surprisingly it doesn't show in the top search results for "<movie> post credit scene".

More and more of my google searches are being appended by "reddit". Someone's asked it before and it takes half a second to load/skip for it. It's sad, but effective

Pretty much all of my searches have that operator now. You used to type your keywords and relevant forums would come up on page 1, brimming with information from people who were knowledgable and eager to share what they know. I have no idea what these niche forums are going to be called, so I have to defer to reddit for my searches.

The reddit keyword is very useful, and so is just "forum". That keyword tends to pop up on forums, so it's useful for finding those niche forums.

Damn I guess this is true about a lot of other very specific questions but are not too niche stuff as well (i.e. programming questions). An example is I was searching if a game had local multiplayer, and what would you know the result was exactly what you described - a paragraph long description of the game and the advantages of multiplayer and the answer hidden in it.

This reminds me of people telling their whole life story and how that rice pudding made them a better person when all I was looking for was the recipe.

There's a chrome extension that surfaces the recipe immediately the page loads so you don't have to wade through a thousand pictures, pre-loaded videos and useless content https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...

same for "name-of-movie streaming release date" will give you a lot of seo filled long articles that often just end with "we don't know"

The title of the article is "He Built...". The article is about Sijbrandij, not about GitLab.

The HN title has editorialized away from the main subject of the article, which it isn't supposed to do. You landed on the article with a false expectation set up by the HN submitter. Forbes isn't responsible for that.

Thanks for explaining why they are doing it. I too was confused why a publication like Forbes used such bad style of writing, it's because they are optimising for Googlebot not us. I was thinking of looking up his name on Wikipedia even to see which business is this.

Does "a publication like Forbes" even mean anything anymore? It's just a blogging platform these days, at least if you see the word "contributor". According to this there aren't even editors:

https://www.joshsteimle.com/writing/how-being-a-forbes-contr...

I wonder if that tactic actually retains people for longer. I just closed the tab after the first couple of paragraphs, googled his name, and found the information I wanted that way.

It seems to be intuitive that if one makes X harder to get via their platform, the user will work harder to get X, but that solution rarely seems to be true.

I hate it almost as much as the ‘soft lede’, where the author decides to spend a few paragraphs describing the weather and kind of jacket the subject of their article is wearing before they get to the point. Maybe it’s SEO, but it just gives me the impression that the author had a failed career as a novelist, and wants to waste my time as an outlet for their creative writing impulses.

Or maybe that's their writing style and the story they're writing?

I'm not usually dismissive, but honestly, people are free to write the article as they wish to, and we're free to read it or not. It always annoys me when people complain about recipe sites for example "I don't want to know what clothes you were wearing when you cooked it, just give me the measurements".

> waste my time as an outlet for their creative writing impulses

What gives us the right to demand something from a writer that isn't what they were writing?

It might be cynical SEO stuff, or it might just be how they like to write - but there are a lot of commenters here that won't be happy until everything is just AI-produced bullet-points.

If a writer is truly writing for themselves, they are the audience: why post it for the public? Otherwise the audience's IS the only judgement that matters.

In the case of this kind of soft/no lede, it comes off as narcissistic and time-wasting, a side-effect of having no editor to determine what is good for the publication, and no cost to cost publish an unlimited stream-of-consciousness.

The AI isn't in the "bullet-points" but in the search engine that does not differentiate well between a key term hit above the fold or spread over the broad middle of an article.

> why post it for the public?

Why not?

> the only judgement that matters.

Not really - you can have multiple target audiences. I.e. you can write for yourself first, and others second - the piece being relevant, with different focuses, for different people. Which is what the majority of these pieces tend to be (if they're not purely SEO gaming)

> narcissistic and time-wasting, a side-effect of having no editor to determine what is good for the publication, and no cost to cost publish an unlimited stream-of-consciousness

What's the problem with any of that? Is everything in life to be optimised purely for efficiency of delivery?

> The AI isn't in the "bullet-points" but in the search engine

My point was rather that some people here would rather boil everything down to purely a list of facts, without any element of story or framing.

> What gives us the right to demand something from a writer that isn't what they were writing?

I’m not demanding anything, I’m just making a statement about my personal taste. If I click on an article, it’s because the headline interested me. If I start reading it to find the content is not at all related to that headline, I just feel annoyed and usually close the page.

I like that style, when it's done well! I agree it has a novel-esque feel, but that's not a bad thing IMO.

I can see how it would be annoying if you're looking for something specific, but not all articles are written to be consumed in the same way.

Yepppp. I hate these two, and I'm a novelist myself (well, I pretend to be sometimes).

I like it that way, it reads like a story and it IS a good story. Not everything in tech or HN has to be to the point and a collection of facts, some narrativity is ok

This is what books and novels are for

That's a little reductive, short form writings/storytellings do infact exist, and can also be wildly popular, Isaac Asimov's The Last Answer immediately comes to mind.

I had the same suspicion from seeing the title and didnt bother to read the article, just came here check the company name.

Forbes is a horrible site/company in general, awful laggy experience, back button hijacking, etc.

The first sentence for me is "Sid Sijbrandij knows a thing or two about building, scaling and even walking away from companies. His current venture, GitLab, is doing over $100 million in revenue and is valued at over $1 billion."

Did they edit the article since you saw it?

Yes, glad to see that common sense prevailed.

Forbes is really shit for a while now. They have become Ad spam heaven. Also a fun fact to share. We used to have an article on forbes linking back to our SAAS product which used to send us good traffic. Forbes funnily got into a similar business and guess what they did. They deleted the entire article lol. Granted they can do whatever they want with their articles but to me this was really shitty.

Yesterday I sent the BBC a complaint about exactly this kind of writing.

In this instance, the title is an outright lie, but the time on site writing-style you describe seems to be there in full swing as well, despite the BBC's revenue model.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-49012771

I don't click Forbes links anymore. The garbage to quality ratio is just too high and not worth the gamble.

I don't think this is a new trend that has anything to do with SEO. It's called "burying the lede" and has been done since the beginning of commercial journalism.

Why so serious? ;)

Im ok with this. It was my choice to read the article after all. Plus if this becomes commonplace people will adapt very fast.

I'm not ok with the trend. I want information, not to have my time wasted. In this specific instance, though, the article is about a person, not actually about GitLab, and so I'm ok with it.

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