Comment by drewbug01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drewbug01 | Hacker News Reader

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> wikihow is a cancer on the internet, clogging google and google image results with inane how-to guides .for the purpose of generating ad revenue. It is not just that the guides are bad but they are engaging in keyword spamming by creating guides for things that don't even make sense

[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.

> wikihow is a cancer on the internet, clogging google and google image results with inane how-to guides

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.

Does the content on wikihow not deliver on what it promises to do? And if so, have you considered editing it - given that it’s a wiki?

Of the things destroying the internet (Google AMP, and Pinterest, in that order), I wouldn’t include wikihow.

No, the content on wikiHow does not deliver. It promises to help you learn how to do something, and I have never successfully used a wikiHow article to learn how to do anything. The content is so low-quality as to be useless.

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.

“What is my motivation to improve it” is an excellent question in my opinion, and worthy of discussion. I don’t know if I have an answer to it, but I do know that there isn’t really another Wikihow-like place out there that’s better. So at least my default answer would be “improve it because it’s better than starting from scratch.”

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.

the wikihow-like place that's better is the entire internet. It contains more useful information than wikihow does (by definition, because it contains wikihow).

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.

I feel that this a somewhat circular argument. The wikipedia-like place that's better is also the entire internet, no?

Yeah wikihow is improving the internet with much needed articles like "How to be Random" https://www.wikihow.com/Be-Random

Fantastic that you don't need the article. I'm sure you also don't really need this article: https://www.wikihow.com/Tie-Your-Shoes

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-...

I find the content and art on the site really cute and heartwarming and occasionally useful, so thanks! There are so many memes on Twitter that use a funny wikiHow image.

Then this may be of interest to you: https://www.redbubble.com/people/wikihow/shop

I have ASD and while I've never had any reason to visit "How to Be Random", I've had plenty of use for similar articles on wikiHow. This even extends beyond the social arena one might imagine I'd need help with. Other topics people with developmental disorders might face difficulties with are exactly the topics handled by wikiHow. Washing clothes, for instance. While saying the wikiHow has been formative of me would probably be over the top, it has guided me when I didn't have the mental capacity to seek help elsewhere.

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