[gitgud]

> "i think this is why search results are cluttered with a proliferation of largely useless "awesome X" GitHub repositories, repetitive bad Medium articles on basic ML topics, and so on."

This is such a sad way to view blogging and Github contributions...

There's nothing wrong with people writing bad articles. In fact everyone writes badly to begin with.

The same goes for Github contributions, everyone starts off with demo repos and broken projects.

The beauty of the internet is that it is infinite and you can build up your skills in blogging and coding over time.

It's the job of search engines to reveal quality results, not for people to only contribute quality results...

[currymj]

i see what you're saying and perhaps i shouldn't have been so negative in my original post.

I think that people who want to write or code shouldn't be afraid to put imperfect work out there.

But if to apply for a job you also have to produce "content" to build your brand, I maintain that this is not a good outcome.

[killtimeatwork]

> There's nothing wrong with people writing bad articles. In fact everyone writes badly to begin with.

It's ok to write badly in the beginning. It's less ok (to say the least) to publish the bad writing in the Internet and decrease it's mean quality level in result. Of course, by now the cat's way out of the bad and Internet is mostly low-effort, low-value crap. Arguably, it's been this way since the very beginning. In terms of quality and curation it's basically the digital equivalent of a wall in a public restroom. But still, I find scribbling on such walls to be in poor taste...

[gitgud]

> "It's less ok (to say the least) to publish the bad writing in the Internet and decrease it's mean quality level in result"

This presumes that the "mean quality level" of the internet is actually important. With the scale of the internet now, it literally doesn't matter how many bad articles are uploaded, as search engines filter what is good/bad for you (whether or not search engines are good is another story). 1,000 results or 10 billion results you'll only look at the top 15 anyway...

> "In terms of quality and curation it's basically the digital equivalent of a wall in a public restroom"

This analogy assumes that there is limited physical space and people will be subjected to reading it, the internet is much different and a lot of content will never get advertised or even read.

So my question for anyone with this line of thinking is, how would you know when your writing has improved and ready to be published? I think the best way is to write and publish often and look for feedback.

[nicbou]

I think it becomes a problem when people do those things because it's required to stay competitive, and not out of genuine interest.