WikiHow’s art is made by a network of freelancers, mostly in the Philippines
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
Hopefully written and illustrated in genuine wikihow style
What surprises me is that there is no Wikihow filter for photoshop and instagram. So consider this my free gift to any enterprising HN reader who wants to make a small fortune with a wikihowification mobile app.
[0]https://m.wikihow.com/Remove-a-Stuck-Tongue-from-a-Frozen-Su...
This sounds like an interesting dataset for fun project to generate images based on descriptions.
Seems like quite a snotty article tbh.
WikiHow's art has always reminded me of "How it Works" style children's books, it seems functional and clearly has made an impression in some quarters.
By all means shed some light on it if that's interesting; I don't see the need for the condescending attitude though.
Please look at the images in the article, if you haven't already. I made more than one audible guffaw just scrolling through them.
However, it's extremely rare to see Cyrillic mixed with Latin letters in a word or sentence and have it intentionally mean both, so my mind doesn't interpret it like that. That's why P is not R to me or C is not S...
From the Type Foundry from whence it came:
Yellix is a mono-linear geometrical sans-serif font family. It was designed in the time I fell in love with Paul Renner’s first sketch of Futura and I also explored stylistic sets, so I added a lot of strict and cold alternatives (“a, g, m, n, r, t, etc.”). I enjoyed having the possibility to create tensions between circular and square shapes. You will also find less geometrically based alternatives. Yellix has horizontal or vertical terminals and the circle forms are punched into the stems.
More here if you're interested: https://displaay.net/typeface/yellix/
In terms of cancer, wikihow is pretty benign. I rarely use Google these days, but when I did, having results full of sites that use worse dark patterns like pintrest & quora & linked-in links was pretty common place.
[citation needed]
But, seriously - you're alleging that they're a content farm. Can you substantiate that at all? Because from where I sit - as a former employee - I can attest that people working there genuinely believe in their mission to "teach anyone how to do anything." Moreover: it's a wiki! You can edit it! They have a thriving community of editors (not paid editors: community editors!) who work on the site, and frankly I don't think that describes content farms.
Calling wikiHow a cancer on the internet is just a huge overreach - there are actual content farms out there doing what you allege. wikiHow isn't one of them. It's absolutely fair to criticize the quality of the articles if you wish - but again; it's a wiki. Feel free to get involved if you don't like the quality.
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 useful to them.
But hell, if you feel that strongly: https://www.wikihow.com/Nominate-an-Article-for-Deletion-on-...
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.
Of the things destroying the internet (Google AMP, and Pinterest, in that order), I wouldn’t include wikihow.
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.
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.
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.
> wikiHow’s art is made by a global network of freelancers, primarily in the Philippines.
(Emphasis mine.)
“GLOBAL network of freelancers, PRIMARILY in the Philippines” != “an army of freelancers in the Philippines”.
> GLOBAL network of freelancers, PRIMARILY in the Philippines
Would mean: freelancers from all over the world, but most of them in the Philippines.
While
> an army of freelancers in the Philippines
Would mean: freelancers from the Philippines, and only in the Philippines.
At least that's my view as a non-native speaker, so maybe worth about 2 cents.
Shock. Awe.
That being said, that action does require an extra click.
> To keep reading this story, create a free account.
on edit: changed original to suggested as being clearer.
HTML doc titles are a legit choice for "original title" in the HN guidelines' sense. In fact, they often say more directly what the article is about when the loudest title on a page is linkbait. That's exactly the case here, so I think the misleadingness of the submitted title ("WikiHow's art is created by an army of freelancers in the Philippines") was simply a casualty of HN's 80-char limit. That's pretty rare btw.
I've taken a crack at shortening it in a more accurate way.
Is Medium now forcing people to create accounts to read posts or is it just a setting that this subdomain turned on?
Their loss.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/03/the-long-complicated-and-e...
There are countless free (and even ad-free) text-only hosting options available. Medium provides nothing of value to me as a consumer. It doesn’t even aggregates the content, people selectively post it to Medium themselves!
I say this as someone that pays for about a dozen online newspaper/magazine subscriptions but will never pay a penny to access a site like Medium or Scribd or Quora or any other site that does nothing but make money off being the middle man.
Anyway, it’s all moot as Medium will inevitably shutter or pivot. Their model is dead, the only reason people chose to post to Medium is because it offered some views. If those views are killed off by requiring a paywall, then Medium itself becomes defunct.
The value is that it's providing a platform to authors who want a platform where they know they'll get readers. I personally don't choose to use Medium anymore, but it's very easy to get people to read your content on there. In the past I've used places like Wordpress, Blogger, my own webpages, etc., and it took a lot more effort to get people to see your content. Whereas on Medium, it didn't take long to get people to look at my content. Few things I wrote went into a black hole.
> I say this as someone that pays for about a dozen online newspaper/magazine subscriptions but will never pay a penny to access a site like Medium or Scribd or Quora or any other site that does nothing but make money off being the middle man.
They make money by being a platform to voices you might not otherwise hear because newspapers and magazines pick and choose a small set of authors to write most of their content. If that's not your cup of tea, then it's not your cup of tea.
I choose not to use Medium as an author, but I understand why people choose to publish on it and why some people would choose to pay for it.
> Anyway, it’s all moot as Medium will inevitably shutter or pivot.
Like every other business conceivably?
> If those views are killed off by requiring a paywall, then Medium itself becomes defunct.
Is that actually happening?
That's providing value to the authors, not the readers.
Author's own blog or site. If they do not want to do it that's fine. They can chose Medium I can chose to not read.
You can choose to not read Medium articles, but authors are using it for a reason.
OneZero is a publication owned and operated by Medium.
Firefox 68,Mobile, ublock origin
Probably because “analytics engineering reasons”—i.e. it wants to correlate the view with some account’s clickstream, and it really looks like that account should be yours, but it also knows that it’s been a while and so it might now be a guest, and so has logged you out temporarily. But it doesn’t just want to spawn a new temporary clickstream that they’ll have to re-correlate to your account later, because that’s costly to server resources in the O(N) case, and in 90% of cases, it still is you browsing.
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.
No article limits, no sign in dialogs.
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...
This is actually great. I won't create an account, so I've spent a lot less time reading empty posts on Medium and more time just going about my day.