I Hate Content Aggregators And Pile-On Blogs
 

Two of my peeves about the Internet.

The first is content aggregators, like ehow.com and about.com. They pay people a few bucks to write short, sketchy articles on oft-searched topics, larded with search tags, and dominate the results of Google searches. The result is a large volume of low-quality information, written by people who may have no more expertise than their own cribbing from other websites, that drowns out the high-quality expertise that is out there. Lately I go first to page two of a Google search, to avoid this junk.

The second is blogs and purported news sites that simply re"print" rumours and fabrications. A bogus item gets planted online and is suddenly being broadcast by thousands of these sites. They seem to be networked by ideology, as the right-wing sites all simultaneously post the same "news", the left-wing sites do the same with their "news", the tin-foil hat sites have their "news", and so on. Most of the false things people post on PPOT come from these me-too sites, so I guess a lot of "us" actually believe them. When the story proves false, these sites never post retractions or followups. They're on to the next lie.

And of course there's pop-up ads and animated ads, but blockers handle those. Unfortunately there appears to be no blocker for stupid.

I hate those blogs with the photos "10 great photos of cuddly cats..." or something and you click it and it another blog or have to do two clicks. Then you click back to see whatever was funny or adorable and by the end of 10 minutes of surfing an LOLing, you have like 50 windows open.

I hadn't really noticed this all that much before, but I remembered this thread as I was looking for posts about the Oprah show today.

Some of this "writing" is so atrocious that it just has to be auto-generated or something, and yet the results are super high:

Beecher’s mac and cheese is one of Oprah’s favorite things | Celebrities Zone

Beecher's "Mac And Cheese" Oprah's Favorite | Trends Updater

Ugh.