[procarch2019]

It appears to me that recent trends include a lot of titles that seem more click-baity and often have quality of content that matches low effort, attention grabbing titles.

I don’t think it’s necessarily a HN problem, but instead a trending style in publishing articles. I still find gems here and there, but overall I find leisurely consumption of the media online less and less appealing. Fun tech dives or thoughtful articles are less common (or drowned out by the fodder). I remember a time (maybe 10+ years ago) when I would read 10+ of the top 30 posts. Now it’s more like 2 or 3 and I don’t have the heart to load up another 30.

Then again, maybe it’s just me becoming an old curmudgeon failing to adjust to the times.

[mtillman]

OP is a content farm. Check the profile. Would be nice to have a block function for these accounts.

[procarch2019]

My wife and I were just discussing this. I could tell it was poorly constructed just scrolling through.

I guess what I don’t understand is how this gets to the top. Don’t other people see this garbage and just ignore it too? Is there another mechanism in the background that pushed it up?

[precompute]

There's just too many new accounts here these days. If you visit /new you'll see there's a new submission every minute. That's ~1200 a day, if you figure in periodic lulls. Most of these accounts comment a few times and then leave. There should be a week's timeout for every new account, they can comment but not submit. And they can't vote (upvote) until the account's a month old. That would really take care of all the spam and give people a chance to lurk long enough to understand the culture.

[spacemadness]

It’d be nice if we could downvote links as well.

[reaperducer]

Blame automated A/B testing.

Even the New York Times is guilty of this.

I will see an article in the dead tree edition that I want to share with my wife while she's at work, but the title in print doesn't match the A/B-tested internet-optimized online title, making it hard to find.

[procarch2019]

What about the content of the article? I admit I’m a NYT print reader as well and don’t really look at their online content, so I wasn’t aware. It makes sense in context of my comment that they change the title, but wondering if they run the actual contents through something too.

Worried we’re headed for (arrived at) some dystopia where we’ll need to have AI filter and sort all the AI created crap to be able to consume anything meaningful.

[reaperducer]

Fortunately, the text of the articles and the pictures don't change. (I bet the union would have a fit.)

Unfortunately, the Times' search is heavily weighted toward the titles, so searching for unusual words and names from the article doesn't help much.

[rcpt]

What's real disappointing is that this is an IEEE publication.

Everything I've published in IEEE had to go through a lot review but I guess if I had instead put together some bad charts and worded it as blog spam I'd be in their most circulated magazine.

[rimliu]

I am in the same boat. What's worse, for me it looks like it affect conferences too. More effort spent on self-promotion than on desire to share knowledge.