Ehhh there’s a clear line between giving some important context and recapping the entire history & philosophy of a project. So much blogspam following the recipe pattern of giving your entire life story before getting to the point. No, I don’t need to read five paragraphs about why anyone would choose to use git and why businesses like it for an article aimed at developers.
Its not clear to me this is an actual problem. I just actually googled "how to fix a Git conflict" and not a single one has multiple paragraphs describing what things are.
The first result [0] pretty much immediately drops into what commands to run. If that result is part of the problem, I fully disagree it is a problem.
I’m amazed no one has mentioned AI in this thread. The nice thing about LLMs is that, in a way, the framing of the question serves to “seed” the LLM with the context about who is asking. Ask something specific, and it will assume you already know what you’re talking about and give you only what you need.
I've always thought such unnecessary padding was primarily to increase search engine ranking (more topic keywords & more length being generally favored). In today's world, almost no one is incentivized to answer your question as concisely as possible. Usually, quite the opposite because satisfying queries faster tends to reduce their metrics (page views, time-on-site, etc).
A secondary contributing cause is that many people aren't very good at structuring explanations. For example, the old rule of thumb that you usually won't miss anything important if you skip the first third of most YouTube how-to videos existed before the algorithm disfavored very short videos (and post-TikTok that's all changed too).
I think the title of this could be more precisely phrased “Stop Giving Me Background Information About My Question, Just Give Me the Answer.”
My go-to example for this is when I once searched for egg substitutes for a baking recipe. Lots of multi-paragraph results about how eggs are nutritious, why eggs are useful in baking, why you might want to substitute them out. Finally after many more paragraphs of non-answers and many ignored ads: my answer, but not in a brief list, a paragraph for each one further explaining what they are.
I go to an LLM for these sorts of questions now and ask it to be brief. The internet for basic questions of any sort lead to these same frustrating webpages otherwise.
I wonder if nerds looking for cooking info might not be better served by downloading a few hundred old cookbooks from shadow libraries and training an LLM on them. Then you can avoid the pathologies and potential fakeness of online content-mill texts entirely.
I'm in two minds about this. Some articles add useless information in the beginning in cases where I just want a quick fix for the issue. But then there are some instances where knowing how that particular thing works can give me context on what is going on and how it can be fixed. I'm guessing it all depends on the problem and how much time you want to invest in solving it.
I agree that this is annoying, but you answered your own question about why this is the way it is.
> You *Google* “how to fix a Git conflict”, and every result ... is ... *"SEO-stuffed* filler drowning ... the answer.
Mate, you've searched something using Google, and the results you're looking at have been optimized to appear at the top of Google search results. So why are you surprised by this?
Your quibble, if it's with anyone, is with Google and why they value this kind of content (why filling the page with valueless drivel makes it more likely to appear in search results).
Please always explain what things are. All day long I'm following deep links, and nothing bothers me more than people assuming I have perfect context.
Explain once, and then start the next 10 posts with a simple hyperlink to the explanation.
Bonus: only one place to update when you realize you have explained it wrong.
Ehhh there’s a clear line between giving some important context and recapping the entire history & philosophy of a project. So much blogspam following the recipe pattern of giving your entire life story before getting to the point. No, I don’t need to read five paragraphs about why anyone would choose to use git and why businesses like it for an article aimed at developers.
Its not clear to me this is an actual problem. I just actually googled "how to fix a Git conflict" and not a single one has multiple paragraphs describing what things are.
The first result [0] pretty much immediately drops into what commands to run. If that result is part of the problem, I fully disagree it is a problem.
[0]: https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-...
It heavily depends what you’re looking for, but I’m running into blogspam & useless websites many times every day when trying to do research
I’m amazed no one has mentioned AI in this thread. The nice thing about LLMs is that, in a way, the framing of the question serves to “seed” the LLM with the context about who is asking. Ask something specific, and it will assume you already know what you’re talking about and give you only what you need.
Literally yeah, with a good system prompt, you basically get zero verbosity except what you actually need, it's unbeatable for quick snippets.
With that, you have essentially turned the regular website content into a protocol (not intended for humans) and the LLM into the browser.
That’s just… I don’t know what to feel about that. I’d rather keep the websites we visit for humans first, LLMs second. Not the other way around.
I've always thought such unnecessary padding was primarily to increase search engine ranking (more topic keywords & more length being generally favored). In today's world, almost no one is incentivized to answer your question as concisely as possible. Usually, quite the opposite because satisfying queries faster tends to reduce their metrics (page views, time-on-site, etc).
A secondary contributing cause is that many people aren't very good at structuring explanations. For example, the old rule of thumb that you usually won't miss anything important if you skip the first third of most YouTube how-to videos existed before the algorithm disfavored very short videos (and post-TikTok that's all changed too).
I think the title of this could be more precisely phrased “Stop Giving Me Background Information About My Question, Just Give Me the Answer.”
My go-to example for this is when I once searched for egg substitutes for a baking recipe. Lots of multi-paragraph results about how eggs are nutritious, why eggs are useful in baking, why you might want to substitute them out. Finally after many more paragraphs of non-answers and many ignored ads: my answer, but not in a brief list, a paragraph for each one further explaining what they are.
I go to an LLM for these sorts of questions now and ask it to be brief. The internet for basic questions of any sort lead to these same frustrating webpages otherwise.
I wonder if nerds looking for cooking info might not be better served by downloading a few hundred old cookbooks from shadow libraries and training an LLM on them. Then you can avoid the pathologies and potential fakeness of online content-mill texts entirely.
I'm in two minds about this. Some articles add useless information in the beginning in cases where I just want a quick fix for the issue. But then there are some instances where knowing how that particular thing works can give me context on what is going on and how it can be fixed. I'm guessing it all depends on the problem and how much time you want to invest in solving it.
I agree that this is annoying, but you answered your own question about why this is the way it is.
> You *Google* “how to fix a Git conflict”, and every result ... is ... *"SEO-stuffed* filler drowning ... the answer.
Mate, you've searched something using Google, and the results you're looking at have been optimized to appear at the top of Google search results. So why are you surprised by this?
Your quibble, if it's with anyone, is with Google and why they value this kind of content (why filling the page with valueless drivel makes it more likely to appear in search results).
Yeah, just use another search engine or *gasp* a search program running on your computer.
I totally agree, but with the caveat of: don't use TLAs without at least a single use of the term in full or a wiki link!
TLA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-letter_acronym
Is this just rage-bait?
But SEO