I haven't followed the Dustin-drama. In fact I don't know anything about it, but that something happened one day and he changed his tag line from "hero" to "villain".
But I've followed more than a few links from Hacker News to articles on Svbtle over the past months and came away with the strong sense that they're of unusually low quality. Maybe I'm just not the target audience, but the articles I've seen have been vacuous without exception. I went to the home page just now and scrolled down and found more of the same. Having been the editor of a print magazine in a past life, I'm a fan of the curated approach, and I like much of the front-page content on Hacker News, so this surprised me.
It looks like saved stories aren't public here, so I can't use them as a constructive example of content I think is good. But I use reddit for similar purposes
If I had to describe the Svbtle content direction, I'd say it's like somebody is randomly scraping longer comments off of TechCrunch articles and putting them into a blogging system.
There's something about their content feels fake, though. When I run across one of their pages in a search, it's not always terrible, but if I don't initially notice where I am, I sometimes get this weird feeling that the text I'm reading isn't quite right, and might not actually contain any information. It frequently has this pumping-out-words-to-fill-the-page feeling, very strongly reminiscent of high-school students' essays.
I am biased because I used to work there, but the how-tos on https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials are well-maintained by a team of technical editors, writers, and paid contributors.
They treat articles like code, the average article has 30+ edits, and reports of issues are triaged and turned into edits and updates.
I disagree that the quality is dirt-poor. I can still find a decent amount of good articles on Ars Technica, but they also have a lot of noise dedicated to generating clicks and likes. The article posted above is a good example.
I think its really really hard to make money producing online content. A lot of these companies start strong and have good intentions, but financially its not sustainable and they go into more click-bait and poorly written articles.
I haven't visited that site in a long time. Looking at the home page there isn't anything I would want.
Most articles are shite. I feel that casual users upvote anything medium because it has sort of established itself as an important platform for good developers. However, if you read most of them, it's just rambling and you don't learn anything. A lot of it is very ranty.
Yes, unfortunately. I speak only for myself though. I found some very good articles there and even then I couldn't help getting turned off when I read them because I associate them with the mountains of subpar material that get published there and the horrible reading experience.
My thoughts exactly. A site dedicated to a craft that is then filled with hundreds of poorly rushed articles rather than a few good quality ones without being invasive is contributing to the shitshow. I wish that there was an alternative index that valued quality rather than gamification of the crawlers.
I haven't examined their corpus. But actually the worst articles aren't particularly relevant. On HN we're interested in the good articles. Bad sites sometimes produce good articles, and those are the ones we want here. Conversely when a good site produces a bad article, we don't want it here.
Going by article quality rather than site quality works well for HN and has been this way for a long time. We have various penalties for various lower-quality (for HN) sites and various ways to override them.
yeah it is a pretty good source for learning SEO, but everytime they teach you something they do it using their own paid tool. My problem with them is that they recommend their own tool in all of their articles and don't care about what tool I am currently using. I don't mind using a paid tool, I am currently using SEMRush.
Some sites are DOA - designated as overwhelmingly bad in general. Some articles on those sites may be worthwhile, but on balance, anything decent that appears on those sites will appear somewhere else, so it's not worth allowing them.
Perhaps you found a rare decent article on one of the sites effectively blacklisted.
Again, specific examples would help diagnose what you're seeing.
I'm constantly amazed at how often I stumble upon About.com's material, even for topics well covered by more reputable sites. When I think of About.com, I think of junk content just barely better than Yahoo Answers...but some sections do have a wide breadth of content that you'd think would be too technical of minutiae for About.com
Note: I can't say the quality of the technical writing is good. I'm just surprised they try to do so much at all, given the number of great technical blogs and free references out there (nevermind, ahem, Stack Overflow). It just goes to show that About.com's content strategy seems to be very lackadaisical
Not related to coding, but I've noticed a lot of "best of" and "top ten" sites that appear to be of the same ilk, possibly automated, that just combine pictures and paragraphs ranging from ad copy to pure drivel. On topics ranging from bicycles to Linux distro's.
Agreed. Despite the poor architecture of the site, if you value the article itself, visit the original source. If you do not, the site receives less notice, less advertising revenue, and less funding. QED, less interesting articles for you to consume.
With ublock origin I have not seen any modal logins.
For example this article on red black trees: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/red-black-tree-set-1-introduct... does not seem that horrible with proper references to CLRS and everything
OP is talking about ugly looking automated Stack Overflow copies. No idea how those end up so high in rankings.
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