Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevage | Hacker News Reader

The phenomenon they describe for health information is, IMHO, absolutely rife across many different domains. Try looking up information about gardening, plant management, home improvement, etc - you'll find the same thing. Search results dominated by sites that have mastered the art of producing SEO-optimised "content" that is not authoritative, full of waffle, and not especially helpful.

For whatever reason, the business model of "draw a huge amount of traffic" outcompetes the business model of "provide a really good source of information".

It's interesting to ponder why in very specific domains, that's not the case: for instance, StackOverflow dominates in programming queries, and provides very useful content.

Someone much smarter than me should write a really good blog post about this.

View on HN

Because StackOverflow successfully (for some value of success) transitioned the forum model to the modern web.

We had these "really good sources of information" - we had forums dedicated to almost any topic you could want to know about, and people educated in the area would frequent them.

They've almost all died out - some remain as a mostly static reference (which is incredibly useful!), others continue to plod along. A few subreddits pop up now and then, but it's not really the same thing (subreddits are even more prone to "flooding" from outside "contributors" who end up turning it into a meme-reddit).

If a company is tangentially related to a topic, you can do worse than dedicating a few full-time employees to a forum on that topic. We're posting on one right now!

Meanwhile search results are absolutely infested with sites that scrape and rehost StackOverflow content, and somehow manage to get better search engine rankings than StackOverflow itself on many queries.

> They've almost all died out

I'm a member of a few active old-school forums. The reason they didn't grow like StackOverflow did is because you really need to spend a lot of time reading through garbage (small talk, etc) to get to the good stuff.

The answer to the question (as posed in the title), might be 3 pages away. With StackOverflow, the answer is almost always immediately under the question since it's been voted into that position.

Another somewhat successful area: Very specific task based home maintenance instructional videos on youtube.

I'm not sure why but if I look up specific tasks I do find what seem like capable handy man / plumbers or similar folks with good quality advice.

Medical stuff.... oh gawd almost no chance of good advice there. But maybe that's because the range of "hey we don't know" or "it's complicated" that you're going to get from honest folks when it comes to the medical world, and most folks gravitate towards solid answers that hucksters love to give.

Hucksters might find it hard to monetize "how to cut down a small tree", while "cold remedies" are prime grounds for them.

Yeah handymen want to impress you so locals hire them. Mail order shops want to scam you into making one bad purchase.

I have noticed this on YouTube as well, I would assume something similar is happening on other video sites.

Sometimes there is a video on a trending topic among the first few Google search results, and when you go over to YouTube and have a look it turns out to be a montage of stock and/or stolen photos, with a synthesized voice reading a narration that was obviously churned out by a content mill somewhere very low-wage, if not generated by "AI."

It baffles me that Google ranks these things highly, it's not like they don't have an eye on YouTube activity.

In the end I have no better explanation than institutional rot: so much money is flowing in, and engineering incentives are so perverse, any problem that doesn't directly irritate the cash cow is not gonna get fixed.

I've started using YaCy and Searxng for searches. It was terrible at first but I set my YaCy engine off indexing high quality sites that I find useful for the subjects I'm interested in.

It's refreshing in some ways - the content I get is definitely "outside of my promoted echo chamber". However, you really need to use use query syntax to get decent results, something I'd gotten out of the habit of doing with Google (actually, I'm convinced Google ignored it half the time even if you tried).

This is very common for electronic gadgets that haven't come out yet. Since there are no real reviews, but enough search interest, people will make awful slideshow-based videos that just repeat the specs and use OEM's own teaser footage.

I believe you don't have this problem with stackoverflow because it's user generated content. Answers provided by people doing it out of passion are usually better. That's why you'll often find the best answers on Reddit.

As to why there is no successful medical overflow.com: Software developers are inherently more web-affine and likely to help there. On top of that it's a great way for developers to show their knowledge in a way they can show to prospective employers. The medical field is a lot more old-school sand I cannot imagine a doctor showing their online help history to a potential employer.

I wonder if a bounty or information-bridge would work?

Make there an incentive for medical knowledge to dump on there, or have people who are incentivized to go get that data and deliver it.

The difference is that software developers have a freedom of speech online. There is no legal liability or professional consequences for a junior coder accidentally giving out wrong-headed or misleading programming advice. So coders post freely, and the good posts eventually float to the top.

In licensed and regulated fields - law, medicine, finance - the situation is quite different. Posting a bad answer might result in you getting sued by an angry reader or investigated by your field's regulatory body.

> Try looking up information about gardening, plant management, home improvement

I found a particularly egregious offender the other day.. the #2 result for "best cordless screwdriver" is one of those content farms that made a "Best of 2022" article. Their top recommendation in 2022 is an old NiCad one that was discontinued in 2015!

Tragedy of the Commons. We all could use easily accessible, accurate and unbiased medical information, but most people can't or won't pay a website to procure and publish such content, especially when they don't really know if they can trust the site! It's rather circular.

If only there were some association of all people, some kind of organization that included all members of the public, which could collect a nominal fee for common goods and services and then provide them freely after the fact. Some sort of union that governs what goods and services are provided...

The existence and success of Wikipedia (and other similar sites) easily counters this notion of needing consumer propensity to pay for a knowledge repository. Sure, reliability and accuracy of the information may be put into question, but that would have been a concern either way even if it were a paid service.

People are not encouraged to make personal health decisions by Wikipedia.

We all know the people that collect the nominal fee have the best interest in delivering a quality product - a serious responsibility to do so even - and not solely making their section of the entity larger and more powerful year over year.

What is a bureaucrat if not a highly skilled creator who completes their mission ahead of time and under-budget?

This, but unironically. A number of countries (and a number of federal and state orgs in the US) have competent sources of record for the public good. Why we don't have it for medicine is beyond me.

Governments would need to run big very expensive ad campaigns to change peoples behaviour from “googling” to entering a government website url. The browsers now make searching so much easier than typing an URL.

A partial salve would be a search engine that only returns results from websites where the people writing cannot make money from their content.

It's quite interesting to ponder the implications of this.

When you put it that way, it's so glaringly obvious that Doubleclick (wearing their Google skin; keeping the name when they merged was the smartest thing the devil ever did) is the precise and irreconcilable opposite.

I looked up a “how to change guide spark plugs” for a vehicle.

First hit was SEO garbage that started off “Before we explain the steps, let’s first examine what the proper stoichiometric ratio is!”

… I closed that site while grinding my teeth.

The internet kinda sucks now.

This seems like a side effect of centralized power in general. You see it at amazon too which is full of either subpar goods or counterfeit products[1]. It becomes a game of manipulating these companies into showing your product/good/service, and only part of winning that game is producing a quality product

[1] https://davidgaughran.com/amazon-has-a-fake-book-problem/

I think it's because professionals and expert users know what good content looks like, which feeds back into the algorithm. The average gardener using the web (not books or other local knowledge) for advice doesn't.

Google says "democracy on the web works" which means that what wins is what looks good to the average person among the population who uses that search term.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com