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Content quality on the internet

 •  • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

The internet is serving us surprisingly well during the pandemic. In many ways, it’s living up to the potential we always knew it had.

But content quality online is in free fall, especially in health care — it was never good (see Starman), and it’s getting worse. The web is increasingly dominated by corporate content mills that pump out thousands of shallow pieces tuned to maximize Google search rank. It’s like if you went into a library and 80% of the books were advertorials. And of course its not like the private stuff is all solid gold!

Fortunately, there are still a few independent publishers working extremely hard to produce high quality, useful articles optimized for people rather than search engines.

We do worry about how long we can keep it up, though. Now much more than ever.

PainSci Member Login » Submit your email to unlock member content. If you can’t remember/access your registration email, please contact me. ~ Paul Ingraham, PainSci Publisher