Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicolas_t | Hacker News Reader

As a side note, I miss reading blogs from people. I remember 12-14 years ago when google was still useful to find information, I would often stumble onto blogs that had a lot of relevant info. For example when looking for reviews about a private school, I'd see a blog with someone whose kids go to that school, when looking for reviews of a restaurant, I'd see someone with reviews on their blog, etc...

Now it seems that whenever I search for something, I only get content farm and search engine optimized garbage.

I do get that now a lot of this has migrated to instagram, tiktok and/or youtube but it's not searchable (and it's a lot less useful than it used to be)...

View on HN

SEO is much like prioritizing lines of code developed. When you set an arbitrary measure and enforce upon that, you will find that the only thing achieved is that arbitrary measure.

For sure, it also seems to me that at one point Google was still engaged in a game of cat and mouse, trying to detect and block cheaters, changing the algorithm but nowadays it seems they've given up?

The old mantra - you can only improve what you measure

Measure the wrong thing, improve the wrong thing :|

YouTube took over that niche. What used to be a blog post is now a 10 minute video.

A ten minute video containing two minutes of useful information I could read in thirty seconds...

I despise this pattern SO MUCH.

No, I don't want to watch 30 seconds of ads, then five minutes of bullshit exposition, to get to the 30 seconds I care about.

At least with written material I can scan through it quickly to find what I want. With video? I'm fucked.

Hah. Now I know what I can plagiarize for writing blog posts...

This is surprising to me, I’d say YouTube videos are harder to produce (and arguably consume) than blog posts. Does anyone know why are we seeing this trend? Is it because of monetization / easier to reach audience / something else?

Keep in mind there are a lot of people who don't use a computer outside of work/school. For many people it might be a lot easier to lean their phone against something and hit record in the YouTube app than to type out a blog post

Lots of people just don't like (or aren't that great at) reading, unfortunately.

Most people are functionally illiterate.

On monetization it's not even close afaik. Some YouTubers make seven figures, and I don't know that blogging can get there. Although if some bloggers are making seven figures I'd be intrigued. Several YouTubers voluntarily discuss their numbers.

It didn't, because there is barely anything of any substance on YouTube. If there is, it's by someone with a production team - which is very far removed from the use-case of a blog.

I think that's a really dismissive claim. I'm literally browsing HN coming off of this video by toldinstone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDeQkttORoc

Substantial, I think. I've been there and I learned stuff from this video. And he does not have "a production team".

I kinda find that YouTube feeds you what you want to find, once it knows a little about you. If you want insubstantial content, it's absolutely there, but you can tell it not to serve you slop in an instant.

I’m currently watching a 6-part series documentary on a group of people who spent years of their lives attempting to complete Mario 64 in as few presses of the A button (which is the jump button, probably the most important action in the game) as possible. It’s around 4 hours long (so far), made by a single person and goes extremely in-depth not only on the timeline that tricks were discovered, but also on the game’s mechanics and how the absurd glitches used by the runners work under the hood.

To say productions like these aren’t of substance is just ignorant at best.

Lot of mechanics, carpenters and other tradesmen showing you how to do a lot of practical stuff.

What are you missing there?

However with all such things, there is finite amount of knowledge. We are now getting to the end of one generations outpour of knowledge and the cycle is repeated with next-gen.

Highly recommend Thinking About Things (https://www.thinking-about-things.com), which sends me articles from blogs I've never heard of a few times a week. They also have a pull-version at https://readsomethinginteresting.com.

All of that stuff has been commodified and monetized. In a world where that wasn't happening, this sort of (for the lack of a better term) organic content would be on instagram etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com