This describes so much of the content on the web nowadays and it’s just exhausting.
I thought I was the weird one with my ultra-succinct communication but I now know the endless walls of text reflect the corrupting effect of needing to please search engines.
That explains a lot of the crap I see. Google something very specific like how to setup a testing library? You'll get an article from dev.to with a 3000 word wall of text containing not only a verbose description of what is unit testing and why you should unit test, but also the author's life story and maybe a recipe for mojitos
The actual content was a couple of shell commands and like 3 lines of JSON
Worse still are those auto generated spam sites that have an FAQ index on the top of the page looking like a Wiki but are actually just empty content pulled in from multiple sources.
It's actually more useful than that. Even for queries with objective, straightforward answers, if I get a search result with a Wikipedia article and a quora answer I almost always go with quora. The Wikipedia result is an article written by a faceless group of people and there's no way for me to gauge the quality other than included references (which are very hit and miss on a good number of articles). The quora result is a variety of answers from a bunch of people with real names attached (in most cases). I can pick which answer I think feels more authoritative or detailed, or mix and match answers. I think having a real name behind the answer and each answer not just being a mishmash of contributions from anonymous sources results in higher quality answers I can trust (or at least make a decision about what level of trust I want to have in the answer which is very helpful when you're getting answers from the internet). Also having a bunch of answers to compare and contrast instead of just one definitive answer actually helps
Most of the names though are unknown. Unless it is a really famous person, so it is virtually the same thing as wikipedia which actually has proper information compared to Quora.