The end of hand crafted content | Hacker News Reader

The end of hand crafted content

techcrunch.com

41 pointscwan15 comments

It isn't the end of hand crafted content -- it puts a heck of a squeeze on the middle of the quality curve, though.

Demand Media et al compete for more phrases versus me than my actual competitors do, simply because they are virtually guaranteed to have a piece which is laser targeted at a query like [how do i make a bingo card]. In a perfect world, I'd like to rank for that query, rather than having to pay eHow for an AdSense click about it.

I have, nonetheless, paid over $20 over the past year for clicks on ads on this page:

http://www.ehow.com/how_2120747_make-bingo-cards.html

Demand Media's entire business model is that that page cost them $4 to create. They keep half of what I pay Google, so they're ahead quite a bit on that page -- and there are other advertisers than me with ads there.

My strategy for competing with this, such that it is, is to go for depth over breadth, do a bit of the outsourcing thing myself, and compensate for my comparative lack of scale with focused use of programming. I pretty much can't outrank eHow for "How to X" questions in a systematically economic manner. I can, however, outpublish them regarding actual bingo cards which, since it is what the customer actually wants, tend to get the links and build the self-reinforcing authority.

For those of us who are at least partially in the publishing business (and I really am at least partially in the publishing business by dint of my SEO strategy), you have to have some idea of how you're going to compete on the long tail versus mass amounts of textually unique garbage backed up by impressive domain authority. At least until Google brings the hammer down on them. (Honestly, that Wired piece would have made me very uneasy if I were working for them. Google doesn't mind people doing SEO, but SEO which scales algorithmically pisses them off like you wouldn't believe. That is practically their working definition for black hat.)

I dont think so. Sure, the signal to noise ratio is declining on the web, but we dont have to depend on Google to deliver things that interest us. I think HN is a reasonable model for a filter. Sturgeon's Law certainly applies here, but I manage to find a few posts that follow my interests. Most of the time the comments are more relevant than the link.

HN is really crowd source editing with a very high level of participants. I dont see any sign that purely statistical aggregation is going to cut the mustard soon.

I completely agree. People will simply adapt and find new ways to locate quality, original content. If HN-like sites are the solution they will take over. If not someone else will come up with a solution.

Echoing the other views around here:

The internet is giving rise to even better hand crafted content, not worse. Pick up any newspaper printed at any time and compare the entire thing (every section, every page) to the entire first couple pages of Hacker News links. It doesn't even come close. Most newspaper articles are pure drivel and ridden with ads, while the front page of HN has incredibly well written views on markets, business, technology, finance, etc... One of my favorite sites of all time is dustincurtis.com, a guy so far from cramming out a McDonalds article a day that it is silly.

I agree with you. I think the quantity of craft content has exploded in recent years, with the rise of blogging and with digital content sites displacing traditional media. However, as a proportion of total Internet content, yes, McDonalds content may dominate the pie chart.

I contrast the stuff I regularly read on two of my favorite online (non-tech) content sites, Salon.com and OpenSalon.com, to something like AOL.com's homepage and many of the blogs @ Xanga.com, and I notice a considerable difference in craft. But that doesn't mean the craft stuff isn't out there -- and in much greater quantity than ever before.

That's basically my rule for the web. The average quality of everything on the web is low, but total absolute quantity of high-quality content is higher than the world before the web. That's part of the reason I built my startup, http://parse.ly -- to help people find the good stuff based on their own personal interests.

You certainly will be subjected to shitty McDonalds-type content if you keep reading TechCrunch.

I think good filters, in search engines and at the users' end will make it really hard for mediocre and bad autogenerated content to ever compete with good hand crafted content.

Autogenerated content, for example, will never be able to replicate the snark of TechCrunch or the gossipy tone of Valleywag very effectively. If they ever come close, they will still need primary sources of information.

The content that they're talking about (articles on ehow.com and friends) are generated by Mechanical Turk or some similar arrangement, not by Markov chainers! But I'm sure they'll jump on autogeneration as soon as they possibly can.

I didn't really understand this article. My interpretation was all of these spammy sites that steal and scrape content will overtake all of those that actually produce things. But the spammy sites still need to get their content somewhere and finding the content's original source can't be too hard. Or did I totally miss the point?

They're trying to say something beyond that, but I'm not sure what it is either.

It looks to me like an accident in the metaphor factory. Someone decided that using a fast-food metaphor might yield insight into the future of the publishing business -- hence, this essay. But that's an inane metaphor. The food business is very, very different from the publishing business. Fast food joints like McDonald's succeed because, among other things, great chefs do not scale: I can't click a button and eat a meal made by Jamie Oliver, because the guy lives in another country and food can't travel over TCP/IP; even if it could it can't be copied using rsync; the guy only has two hands and there's a line out the door for tables; the quality depends on ingredients which cost a lot; and even if I have a great meal on Tuesday there's no guarantee that Jamie's Wednesday meal will be great -- maybe Wednesday's special is made with basil, but I'm allergic to basil.

But none of this is a problem with publishing in the age of the Internet.

He's saying that the mass-produced crap "content" sites will all dominate the search result listings and push all the quality content sites out of business because noone will visit them.

But we're not using search engines to get to every place on the web. We learn where the quality content is, we don't rely on generic portals for news and articles. We learn which blogs are good. We get sites recommended by our friends. We find sites and bookmark them and revisit if they're good.

HN reader's discovery methods != those of the vast majority of the population

He still has the old school media mindset that the scoop is the important thing, and he wants respect for being the first one to find out something. Of course, the fact that he's a prime source for the echo chamber means things seem like they have more sources than they do.

But the problem for sites like TC is not that people won't find good news using HN-like sites. The problem is that will not be making money through Google search.

You have to understand that people going to TC through HN or Digg means nothing for them. These people don't click on ads, they are there just to read news and click away. The money is made on people that click through a Google link, because these are the ones that are looking for something specific and ready to click on an ad.

So the problem he is talking about is that is getting harder to get into Google, since sites like eHow are flooding Google with all this dubious content.

The article is not about content scraping, it's about mass generation of low quality content. Read the Wired article they linked and it will open your eyes. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/all/1

(Of course, the demise of quality on the internet began with the creation of AdSense by Google in the first place.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com