I recently saw the tip to add "before:2023" to google search queries and it gives significantly better results. I would like to explain my mentality about "trends" and encourage others to act the same.<p>With SEO optimization and psychological tricks that websites and advertisers attract you to their shitty content. I have subconsciously learned to have a negative reaction to all of them.<p>Same for a news articles and ads.<p>A website is BS if it has any of the following:
- More than a paragraph of introduction
- Word "AI" in the title
- Doesn't have sentences without buzzwords
- Ads with Psychological tricks<p>Truly good websites have around 2 facts per 10 word sentence, and get instantly to the chase. Also: good websites give you the names of all their competitors/alternative websites before showing their own stuff, and give you further reading.<p>Right now the world of technology is supposedly more innovative than ever, but somehow Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.org/) and Search Hackernews (https://hn.algolia.com/) beat billion dollar search engines.<p>Articles written decades ago are still unsurpassed in terms of quality and ease of understanding, but the best modern websites can do is textbook explanations. It is time society graduates from boilerplate buzzword textbook culture.<p>Now the gems of the internet are slowly being buried beneath mountains of trash.<p>If something sounds boilerplate it isn't good enough.<p>Don't bother saying something that has been said before, and better.
And I will be arrogant and say that my rant here meets that criteria.
The SEO has ruined the internet. Now every recipe web site has 5000 words of narrative before the actual recipe (at least now they all have "jump to recipe" buttons). I really dont care to read 5000 word essay on your families history how your grandma made it every summer, etc. They all do this because the AI/SEO wont return their site I guess?
This tracks well with my approach, too. I've generalized it a bit more these days, though. If something looks very polished/glitzy, my instinct is to think that it's probably junk. I picked up this instinct through experience on the web and with modern applications, but have increasingly found it works reasonably well in the real world, too.
I read some time ago on twitter something along the lines of “if you run enough A/B tests, you’ll end up with a porn website” and I guess that’s what the future of high-engagement-web reserves us
Two facts per ten word sentence? That seems fairly dense and I'm guessing probably not a fun read. I guess it depends on what you are describing. But I works question the grammar of a site that packs so much information in such terse sentences