OT: Am I the only one who thinks that most meetups are crap? The idea of meeting like-minded people is tempting but the reality is always different: Crowded places, stuffy air, weak talks, lame sponsors, 1-to-n presentations, no real interaction, stale drinks out of thin plastic cups, odd devs
Only when I am super addicted to HN and only when I am submitting I am going through the New Tab.
Think the current system is broken and have the feeling that in the early votes is too much bias (either through high karma folks, maybe internal hidden push votes etc from HN internal circles eg. admins, alumina).
Btw very good question and I’d love to see someone from HN giving an official statement plus comment how much HN-internal bias might influence the early votes.
Nice content marketing piece and guide for an SEO beginner but I stopped reading here:
> all with a 95% SEO acquisition strategy
That's so wrong. Free organic traffic is great. But if you rely fully on organic traffic, it rather shows that your LTV is not bigger than your CAC and if Google or competition kills your search traffic, your business is done and/or you can't scale when your mighty SEO doesn't work anymore.
You are def right that I should not pack everything in a non-tech cluster and call it crap. However I'd still keep my initial statement, it's a simplicatiom but it's true.
Of course there are and must be great blogs in non-tech areas but they are not that many. Writing high quality blogs for free seems not be common in other fields. Often people rather publish the findings in a protected space, call it academic paper and I can read just a lousy abstract. Actually most academic non-tech fields fall in this category.
Apologies for the attack, couldn’t resist. However, what you wrote is common sense and you should assume that anyone lurking around on HN knows that stuff. I mean you actually described the page rank algorithm which was the foundation of Google but there are many more signals nowadays. So your post felt like a (small) attack too.
FYI, Google runs quite a large spam team which flags scammy sites manually. Sites with such a modal are usually rather on the spammy side of life and gets flagged by the team. If you get too many flags you get severe penalties slowly eating your traffic in a way that it’s not clearly obvious and it can take years to recover.
But since it’s Medium such UI seems to be tolerated.
If I ran that team I would have killed Medium's, Quora's and Pinterest's search traffic. And soon maybe StackOverflows as well.
Forget the casual crowd. First reason: It’s always good to start with one demography and fulfilling their requirements. Second and TBH, the casual crowd sucks steel when creating short-form blog content.
Go to the Linkedin blogs, all non-tech Medium blogs, TED talks, Facebook: 99% is useless, already seen, self-help-type advice covered with click-baity titles.
Every Reddit post has more substance and authenticity than the mentioned above.
Edit: To the pro downvoters, instead of downvoting just reply and link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog.
Thanks for giving us a 101 lesson on the basics of SEO and SERP. Glad that we have some witty minds on HN.
You forgot one thing though: This modal is unnecessarily hiding content and pissing off everyone. It is reason enough to give Medium a heavy SERP penalty for many months.
I disagree. Use your time to setup something smarter than a blog. A turn-key ready static site generator still takes 10x the time to set up than just using a random blog site.
Also, you waste time fiddling with CSS adjusting crappy themes. Only upside would be post editing in vim.
But again, do something smarter, too many new shiny toys wait for you: Tensorflow, Haskell, Rust, ESP32... extend the list yourself.
Able looks promising: Higher information density than Medium, syntax highlighting in code blocks, no big-ass modal interrupting when I just want to read a silly blog post.
Besides, Medium in its current state is one of the most annoying sites and I don't get why it enjoys such a strong SERP ranking. I mean blog posts are a commodity and Medium thinks they are Netflix showing the latest Disney property.
If Google search devs read this: Demote all Medium results.
I can deploy a Docker-based node backend with basic functionality from my phone's ssh client in five minutes.
Give me a bit more time, a keyboard and I could build you any API endpoint, http server, glue code between DB or even low level proxy server functionalities.
No offense but isn't the 'problem' backend solved years ago?
I agree but this might be already useful. The biggest challenge for most when they work from home is lacking social pressure leading to procrastination. When I read about Tandem's take on this, I thought that’s a smart, subtle solution. You could still game the system by just using your phone but still: Any cheating results in odd behavior on Tandem and probably to more discipline. Maybe I am wrong but I need just people who tried Tandem and share their experiences.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dj1048/gitlab_...