I like to use Python in my side projects because it’s fun to write. I iterate with it very quickly and my side projects do not typically have demanding performance characteristics. It’s also sufficiently different than what I do at work. I’m starting a new side project which involves parsing strings in order to roll dice. This prompted me to look up some very basic things about how strings and regular expressions in Python work. You know, basic standard library stuff which I knew but just didn’t remember because I haven’t had to write a totally-greenfield thing in Python for about six or seven years.
Naively, I started just by Googling obvious strings like “python string slice” and “python string to integer.” I found the results incredibly disappointing.
Seven years ago, google searches like that would take you straight to the official Python documentation. Python’s documentation is really very high quality, and is the authoritative source for this type information. It should be the top result for anything that is a question about the Python language, or at least in the top 3 if the query is such that it should match to a documentation page.
Yesterday, Python’s documentation wouldn’t even make the first page of results. On the queries where it did, it was always towards the bottom of the first page. That’s because the top results went to content farms with very low-quality content riddled with advertising. With the text spaced out such that you have to scroll three screen heights just to read one complete paragraph, because they can fit more ads on the page that way. Most of the text is just filler; one paragraph introduction on why the Python programming language is useful to know, then another paragraph on how people want to know how to do thing X, then another paragraph explaining thing X, then one line showing how someone could do thing X in the Python REPL, then a fourth paragraph that’s full of links to other similarly useless pages on that site. Finally, the obligatory headshot-and-blurb about the author and how they’ve been writing about programming languages for all of two minutes. Because they just came out of the womb.
It disturbs me. It’s only natural that, in the aftermath of the scripting wars and the switch to Python as the typical first language that they teach children in Computer Science curricula, we would see content farms vomit out lots of noob bait to make a quick buck. Yet, all of this stuff is displacing actually useful information. Actually, that’s understating it; its displacing the authoritative information – the most useful information. As a result, we’re all collectively getting a little stupider, because the effort to become more informed is increasing rather than decreasing.
Content farms produce the junk food of the Internet, giving us all arterial plaque.