i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Articles written for people not for search engines. I’m very familiar with SEO and you can see very clearly when article is created for ranking rather than movie readership. Unfortunately when 90% of traffic for many sources is Google you have no choice but to write articles this way.

    • FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      God yes.

      I’m a professional writer for a newspaper. We’re also occasionally asked to put up SEO commercial text for our advertising partners. And good god, they look like they were written by a lobotomised monkey on a malfunctioning typewriter.

      • Ejh3k@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Are you not called journalists anymore? Or are you just lying?

        • Z4XC@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          One can write for newspaper and not be a journalist. Columnist for example.

          • FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            In fact, at our newspaper only about a quarter of the writers are ‘real’ journalists with journalism degrees, including myself.

            From my personal experience (20 years in radio, 8 in newspapers), even most actual journalists don’t really call themselves journalists. I tend to refer to myself as a writer in general, since I also do commercial copy, I write reviews and handle all sorts of general writing and public contact.

            Journalist is not a protected job title. Anyone can call themselves a journalist. Even that other poster. Because of that, I tend not to use it as a job title, since it’s been devalued a bit by everyone with a blog or vlogging channel calling themselves journalist.

            I’m seriously wondering what the other poster’s point was…

          • Ejh3k@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Ah yes! The elusive columnist! None of those ever attended J school or are held to journalism standards. They can definitely print whatever the fuck they want without any sort of fact finding or double checking.

    • triptrapper@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      "We’ve all been there. You want to make a large batch of cookies for friends or family, but your KitchenAid stand mixer stopped working. When your KitchenAid stand mixer stops working, it inevitably leads to frustration. This is a common problem. Fortunately, there is a solution. I’ll show you a quick and easy way to fix your KitchenAid stand mixer when it stops working.

      Believe it or not, the first KitchenAid stand mixer was made way back in 1918…"

    • A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      This is one of the few cases where I think having an LLM bot straight up plagiarize an article is valid. They’re going out of their way to waste my time, so I’ll gladly have a bot lift the two sentences of the 20 paragraph article that actually answer the question.

      If they want ad revenue they can make articles for humans, or they can eat my entire ass.

      • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        It’s often not up to publications but up to Google though. Finally Google is collapsing and taking all that spam with them.

        One of the main arguments against LLMs is that content creation on the web will dry up but 90% of content of the web is already inaccurate SEO garbage. Maybe accelerationists were right this time.