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Comment by stefan_ | Hacker News Reader

It's everywhere. DIY sites are full with trash tutorials written by people with no clue what they are doing, but $1 more in their pocket for writing the trash. Quora, that wretched hell hole, is full of nobodies giving the most ridiculous answers since being paid pennies for it. Medium since their monetization push has lots of people who decided their place in the world is pushing out badly copied useless tech tutorials. There are whole SaaS AI sites helping you expand a few keywords into more trash writing. Google hasn't so much made the worlds knowledge searchable, they have poisoned the well.

(Oh, and there are a lot of these people on HN who think writing garbage blogspam for their latest project is a great "growth hack". A hearty fuck you to you, too.)

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> Google hasn't so much made the worlds knowledge searchable, they have poisoned the well.

This happened to Google already with translation. Their translation system started with documents with known translation (e.g. EU and UN official documents). Then they started to use documents on the web that offered their own translations...until Google translate got good enough that people started using it to translate their own websites.

This "inbreeding" or bad feedback made the translations worse until this was figured out and I believe they long gave up automatically using translations found in the wild to improve training. Source: friend who worked on GT at the beginning.

Sounds like a great opportunity to devise an adversarial network that detects google translate output.

I believe they keep logs of all things ever translated simply so they can filter out their own translations they later find on the internet.

It's harder to filter out competitors bad translations though...

A way out of this would be using professionally translated books.

Tech blogs and sites are mostly useless. There are good places MDN, official docs sites (when they aren't written by Google that is). But there is so much just machine generated, or amateur 3rd world generated trash out there that its difficult. Front end development is much worse than other areas with this.

This summer I had a lot of trouble finding information for something specific in Angular on how to do some specific thing, where the official docs didn't cover it in depth enough, and then searching for it online was impossible as it was thousands of "blogs" with the same copy pasted tutorial with a few key words changed around that show the same hello world example.

This is one striking thing about Go. The signal to noise ratio for online resources is excellent. The resources you turn up in a Google search feel professional and practical. When I search Java problems there is a lot more blog-spam, half-assed / misguided copypasta, and a very high ad:information ratio.

We often talk about size of the community as an important consideration when adopting programming tools. But really there is a sweet spot, where a community has enough serious people to produce the right information but not enough unserious people (yet) to bury it. Communities at this stage can be better than those for universal standards.

After reading your comment I realized that I have the exact same experience. I use Java and JS professionally and it's often a pain to find good information for specific issues. As a side interest, I've been using rust for several projects and find information significantly quicker.

For Java I now rely mostly on some more reliable source for information that I tend to directly search rather than go through Google/DDG. Baeldung and Mkyong come to mind.

Surprisingly, some discord groups have also become my go to source for help.

In my experience, there's a strong negative correlation between popularity of a technical topic and the average quality of what comes up in a Google search.

Popular things like Java or JS have page after page of pure crap. Rust or Haskell will have generally pretty good content. Python used to have decent content, but has been trending downwards sharply.

Yeah, I made a very similar observation in a comment last year (which I can't be bothered to find right now).

A lot of it is due to excited beginners wanting to write about $topic. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing as such; and I'm a bet less cynical about it than some others in this thread. It's pretty neat that anyone can write something and put it online. I just wish there was a way to filter this kind of stuff.

This is where the "throw everything in a big bag"-model of the web comes with some pretty big downsides. But I don't really know how to do it better either.

I think it’s a combination of popularity and desirability: are you trying to learn something because you’re genuinely interested or just because it’s what you need to close a ticket and get paid? That’s rarely going to be at either end of the spectrum but Java has been the default choice for corporate body shops for three decades and it really shows in the amount of content aimed at the latter camp. This is amplified by the high frequency of people in that world LARPing as Very Serious Architects layering on gratuitous complexity trying to make business CRUD apps seem more challenging (i.e. expensive) and since statistically nobody understands the system at that point there’s a built-in SEO market catering to the people looking for a quick copy-paste answer.

Interesting, I got the sense that it’s the amateurs / lifestyle strivers who are the market for producing and consuming this content. Go being not very much fun kind of keeps these people away.

This was my experience with Selenium - mixed results of either java or javascript from years ago.

Gave up the inherited CI and rewrote everything in playwright in few weeks.

Stack Overflow is still good...

How dare, this 3rd world trash.

YES YES YES for the tech tutorials.

Many times I look up something, and all the YouTube videos and tutorials are telling the exact same thing and it's clear there was no effort at all or even if the author knows what they're talking about or even tested that code at all.

The filetype:pdf well has also been poisoned, and the results are always just PDFs stuffed with SEO keywords and a link to the real content you were looking for -- except the link goes to a scam/advertising/malware site.

Quora doesn't pay for stupid answers. It pays for the stupid questions that bring in those stupid answers. The stupid answers are generated for free, and get shown ads while they're doing it.

Hopefully this is spelling the end of all this ridiculous "digital economy". I'd love to just go and buy stuff in a physical store - that i find not by googling but because friends recommended me. Buying airline tickets in a physical booking office (ideally still with a debit card, not cash). Reading paid news sites with no ads and no bullshit.

Many people outside of the industry don't know it, but so-called "copywriters" are people who are paid around 1-1.5x minimum wage with the expectation of being able to write texts on ANY topic. I know a girl who does this. Almost all of texts are bs and she is a top performer in her company. She does it because it makes bit more than being a waitress with bit less effort (and given covid, she'd lose a job if she was a waitress, and "copywriter" job is quite secure).

Shall we get surprised with the results?

By the way, a question - bullshit answers on Quora from paid posters - who's paying them and why? Or you mean those Putin trolls and wumaos? Their content tends to be very biased, but of decent quality...

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