They're mostly copying recipes from other places then applying SEO. That's it. The ridiculous probably-made-up stories are for SEO.

Search engines like it. That's the entire story.

There's good long-form recipe content, but nearly all of it's only there for SEO reasons. Most of these sites just make up the "genuine" stories so they have something for Google to chew on. No-one involved, reader or writer, cares about it, except search engines.

The article is an SEO guide for startups, not recipe blogs, which exist in a separate category of SEO gamification.

Startups usually get their SEO hits by writing detailed guides on something tangentially related to their product. For example, I will see posts from Lucidchart's website when I'm looking up "process mapping template". They've created a lengthy web page discussing different types of process mapping, and include downloadable templates.

I had never heard of Lucidchart before, they appear to be a competitor to MS Visio. I ended up signing up for an account, but ultimately felt it wasn't right. I wouldn't have signed up at all if I felt the article I discovered wasn't useful.

Of course you can choose not to bother with SEO at all and hope your website magically generates qualified leads.

I doubt these users will not experience a drop in quality as most authorship will roll out LLM laden content which will add more noise to the signal.

If this matters to you, then you shouldn't. But to flip this around: why should you care?

Unless you're doing some unique work targeting a global audience, the point when LLM gets trained on what you created is way outside space you'd normally care about. Trying to capture all the value your work generates does not lead to a good world.

Or maybe it's me who isn't profit-minded enough, but e.g. a lot of what I wrote on-line, including blog articles and commentary on Reddit and HN, has been used by search engines for free for a long time (over a decade, in some cases), and now is (most likely) part of the training corpora for LLMs. But I never believed, and still don't believe, that I'm entitled to some share of the gains LLMs (or search engines) make.

I didn't mean this article specifically, but it can absolutely be done. Make the LLM the "reader" and have them retell the story like low-quality blogspam that still generates clicks and gets promoted by Google Now-type features.

If you thought clickbait article titles were bad now...

This is my biggest beef with Medium - which isn't really a problem with Medium itself, but how certain "authors" are (ab)using it.

It's quite often that I'll be googling for something, and end up at a Medium article - but it's 50/50 whether it's a good article, or a single paragraph of basic information that's been largely copy/pasted from somewhere else.

There are lots of good articles on Medium, but the large quantity of articles that are basically SEO spam have me clicking through from Google less and less these days.

its only going to get worse. because there will LLMs like chatgpt pumping out content for SEO content mills with no vetting for accuracy, then the next generation of LLMs are trained on them thus further corrupting the knowledge base they pull on to produce new content. its going to be a horrible feed back loop.

Interesting thought.

If this'd happen en masse this allows competition in the market of reviewers, news sites, and social network sites. It also allows for fact checking (which perhaps even gets automated). The model which works is akin to seed fund, or open source development by contract. There'd be say a review in the make of a product X. In order for it to be made, Y USD is required. This is then gathered via crowd funding. Then those who paid get early access, week later its in the public domain. The model isn't even new. LWN uses it, to name an example.

If it made Medium the go-to place for people looking for high quality content that was free of SEO spammy articles, that would be an excellent reason.

Heck, I write articles and I'd pay to have my article posted on a well-regarded site. But I see no point to posting it on free sites with a reputation for low quality. There's an old saying "it's free and worth every penny".

Instead I post them on sites under my control, like digitalmars.com, where I can control the quality of the site.

This is the most important point here. If your content is not actually public, you really shouldn't get the benefits of search engine exposure, HN exposure, or even the distribution from sharing what appears to be a URL to a hypertext document.

If you have to hire and manage a team of content writers it's not that free.

Agreed!

Unsurprisingly, search engines funded by advertisers surface content which is effective at serving ads, rather than quality content. Do you see how this might be a problem?

> Affiliate marketing is a deal with the devil, but it's still a deal worth making. They let me work full time on building a useful resource and offering it for free. I can work with dignity, without having to beg for money, and still without selling out.

My guy, what do you think "selling out" means?

Maybe they can try affiliate links! I think that was how the "crappy" sites used to do it in the old days. I never really understood the whole seo game and if anyone actually made money or just pretended to make money so they can sell courses

I dearly hope that they don't. This is valuable content and we shouldn't penalize it just because you're too lazy to click a single additional time.

There's literally a "web" link you can click on HN to pre-populate the Google query for you. How can you possible object to that?

I have to assume you simply have an ideological opposition to writers being paid and thus oppose the inclusion of quality content on HN.

This has already happened. People put content on their sites only long enough to figure out what works, then turn that content into a book that can be sold. Every Cal Newport book came out of his blog posts.

Others are turning content into paid newsletters, courses and Patreon-only walled content.

Wrote something 15 years ago? Just set the "Date Modified" to last week and Google will think it's been updated.

The 'content' you and I are seeing are just second and third-hand summarizations of popular topics written by content marketers.

Probably because of some combination of his deal with Forbes doesn't allow him to do so and it's often better to have a post/article in one place where it gets the most traffic. (There are other reasons why you might post in multiple places if you can, but SEO is probably not one of them.)