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Comment by notafraudster | Hacker News Reader

It's a short-hand for the treatment of the subject being pretty shallow and non-descript, which seems to apply to this article exactly. I read this and didn't learn anything.

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Do you work on recommendations or something similar as part of your job? I don't and I found the article interesting.

Saying the article is "pretty shallow and non-descript: is much shorter and more useful than what they posted.

Right, but then it starts a meta-conversation about why the article got posted, or even written. It doesn't have the down-the-rabbit hole trait of an individual project of passion, or the sort of authoritative voice of a conference talk or even a Netflix blog post, it doesn't really speak to specific actionable technologies so it's not the kind of onboarding a Toward Data Science post would be. And that meta conversation inevitably leads to, oh, it's a marketing funnel. So just saying "this is content marketing" I think is a shibboleth for the entire conversation that starts with "pretty shallow and non-descript".

Of course I didn't write the original comment and there's something to say for flag-and-move-on or whatever, and other people did enjoy it. I'm just saying I understand the impulse to short-circuit the entire tedious conversation!

> So just saying "this is content marketing" I think is a shibboleth for the entire conversation that starts with "pretty shallow and non-descript".

I'd disagree with this pretty strongly since there are many examples of content marketing that are also very useful pieces of content.

It provides more information. It's shallow and non-descript because it's an ad is the argument. I don't know if I believe that here. It's a blurry line with sponsored content.

Well then it's not "short-hand".

It's short hand because the argument being conveyed is long and has nuances. That you can present part of it in a shorter way is irrelevant.

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