Wikihow is gold mine of often hilariously bizarre tracings of stock or staged photos.
What surprises me is that there is no Wikihow filter for photoshop and instagram. So consider this my free gift to any enterprising HN reader who wants to make a small fortune with a wikihowification mobile app.
Thank you very much OP for the clear title that save me a lot of time not wasted figuring out the reply to the clickbait title of the original article.
If only the guys that are posting New York times articles and co could do the same...
Getting to the bottom of one of the internet’s most ridiculously drawn mysteries
Seems like quite a snotty article tbh.
WikiHow's art has always reminded me of "How it Works" style children's books, it seems functional and clearly has made an impression in some quarters.
By all means shed some light on it if that's interesting; I don't see the need for the condescending attitude though.
Devoid of context of the parent WikiHow article, the images are often surrealist and bizarre, which is why they've become something of a subcategory of memes.
Please look at the images in the article, if you haven't already. I made more than one audible guffaw just scrolling through them.
That illustration for "how to protect yourself from dogs while walking" doesn't appear on the current WikiHow entry. Did someone edit the entry and remove it or add different art?
Yellix is a mono-linear geometrical sans-serif font family. It was designed in the time I fell in love with Paul Renner’s first sketch of Futura and I also explored stylistic sets, so I added a lot of strict and cold alternatives (“a, g, m, n, r, t, etc.”). I enjoyed having the possibility to create tensions between circular and square shapes. You will also find less geometrically based alternatives. Yellix has horizontal or vertical terminals and the circle forms are punched into the stems.
It's hilarious. I've just learned a bit of Cyrillic during holidays, and even I can hardly stop reading it as "OpeZego" and so on. It must be almost unreadable for people from the many countries with a Cyrillic alphabet.
You can't imagine how often it happens when someone is trying to appear "Russian" or just trying to be fancy. As a native speaker, you can't help but keep reading it in Cyrillic, and the result is completely garbled.
Well, it's not unreadable at all, though a bit ambiguous, for me. I think people who's native languages only have Cyrillic letters don't struggle with it as much as some people who's languages have two official alphabets - i.e. my native Serbian, which has Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, that are equally taugh in schools, accepted by the government and un-prejudiced (well, other than extreme right people who force Cyrillic as the only "true" alphabet [sigh]).
However, it's extremely rare to see Cyrillic mixed with Latin letters in a word or sentence and have it intentionally mean both, so my mind doesn't interpret it like that. That's why P is not R to me or C is not S...
wikihow is a cancer on the internet, clogging google and google image results with inane how-to guides .for the purpose of generating ad revenue. It is not just that the guides are bad but they are engaging in keyword spamming by creating guides for things that don't even make sense
> wikihow is a cancer on the internet, clogging google and google image results with inane how-to guides .for the purpose of generating ad revenue. It is not just that the guides are bad but they are engaging in keyword spamming by creating guides for things that don't even make sense
[citation needed]
But, seriously - you're alleging that they're a content farm. Can you substantiate that at all? Because from where I sit - as a former employee - I can attest that people working there genuinely believe in their mission to "teach anyone how to do anything." Moreover: it's a wiki! You can edit it! They have a thriving community of editors (not paid editors: community editors!) who work on the site, and frankly I don't think that describes content farms.
Calling wikiHow a cancer on the internet is just a huge overreach - there are actual content farms out there doing what you allege. wikiHow isn't one of them. It's absolutely fair to criticize the quality of the articles if you wish - but again; it's a wiki. Feel free to get involved if you don't like the quality.
No, the content on wikiHow does not deliver. It promises to help you learn how to do something, and I have never successfully used a wikiHow article to learn how to do anything. The content is so low-quality as to be useless.
And "it's a wiki" isn't a defense. What is my motivation to improve it? Nobody trusts wikiHow anyways, so contributing would just be creating more content that nobody should trust.
“What is my motivation to improve it” is an excellent question in my opinion, and worthy of discussion. I don’t know if I have an answer to it, but I do know that there isn’t really another Wikihow-like place out there that’s better. So at least my default answer would be “improve it because it’s better than starting from scratch.”
I do overall disagree with the thrust of your comment, though: your anecdote and mine cancel each other out. You haven’t been helped; I have! On balance I think they are helpful. I don’t have access to the statistics anymore but from what I remember, more people interacting with the website rated articles positively than not.
the wikihow-like place that's better is the entire internet. It contains more useful information than wikihow does (by definition, because it contains wikihow).
wikihow could be valuable if the content it contained had some generally assumed level of authority that was better than the internet at large, so you could assume that a wikihow article was more trustworthy than any other random result from google. as long as wikihow articles can't be assumed to be more helpful than any other google search result, google is a superior alternative to wikihow.
Have you considered that there might be people who would find that article on "being random" interesting or helpful? Consider just for a moment, the perspective of someone who isn't what we'd call "neuro-typical" - someone with an ASD, for example. Such an article might be incredibly useful to them.
I have ASD and while I've never had any reason to visit "How to Be Random", I've had plenty of use for similar articles on wikiHow. This even extends beyond the social arena one might imagine I'd need help with. Other topics people with developmental disorders might face difficulties with are exactly the topics handled by wikiHow. Washing clothes, for instance. While saying the wikiHow has been formative of me would probably be over the top, it has guided me when I didn't have the mental capacity to seek help elsewhere.
I find the content and art on the site really cute and heartwarming and occasionally useful, so thanks! There are so many memes on Twitter that use a funny wikiHow image.
Web search is hard, and Google's results aren't stellar. News at 11. Why do you think we're on HN?
In terms of cancer, wikihow is pretty benign. I rarely use Google these days, but when I did, having results full of sites that use worse dark patterns like pintrest & quora & linked-in links was pretty common place.
Please don’t editorialize titles, four out of five times the editorialized title is strictly worse, and often it’s straight up wrong, like in this case. If you don’t like the original title due to omission of info, you can at least use the HTML title:
> wikiHow’s art is made by a global network of freelancers, primarily in the Philippines.
The HTML doc title is "wikiHow’s Art Is Made By a Global Network of Freelancers, Primarily in the Philippines". That's too long to fit HN's 80 char limit, so it looks like the submitter made a good-faith attempt at shortening it, and an inaccuracy crept in that way—quite a minor inaccuracy. The submitted title ("WikiHow's art is created by an army of freelancers in the Philippines") was still far better than the sensational dross of the page heading.
HTML doc titles are a legit choice for "original title" in the HN guidelines' sense. In fact, they often say more directly what the article is about when the loudest title on a page is linkbait. That's exactly the case here, so I think the misleadingness of the submitted title ("WikiHow's art is created by an army of freelancers in the Philippines") was simply a casualty of HN's 80-char limit. That's pretty rare btw.
I've taken a crack at shortening it in a more accurate way.
I know editorializing is against the rules but I love the current title, "WikiHow's bizarre art is created by an army of freelancers in the Philippines", it sounds so quaint and absurd.
Those are functionally equivalent imo. The NYPD operates in other cities and countries. I wouldn't expect people to preface a description of them by saying they were a global police force based primarily in the Phillipines
Let me save you a click, & the authors future banal efforts: utilitarian work is a global effort of freelancers. Some just have different obligations as part of their freelance work than others.
Please don't post like this. It's off topic and such threads are always the same. And users usually post workarounds in the thread, as they did in this one.
Medium is quickly going down the Quora path for me. The content quality is becoming poorer as more and more people use it as a place to dump their zero-traffic blog posts.
The aggressive content gating and pop-ups are another Quora-esque introduction.
Just a case of being blinded by metrics. Adding an aggressive sign-up form might get you more emails and sign-ups, but it will also annoy away better quality users.
It is also worse than quora because quora can be blocked easily in search results since it is one domain. People use medium with their own domains too, which makes it hard to block entirely.
I had a Lyft driver trying to explain to me how they’re going to make it big on Medium. I still am not sure what they write about or how exposure on Medium works, but they were convinced that it was THE place to blog. I could only politely nod and smile thinking about how often I saw that obnoxious user hostile popover.
Weirdly enough, I think it only does it if it knows you’ve been logged into Medium on your device before, but are currently logged out.
Probably because “analytics engineering reasons”—i.e. it wants to correlate the view with some account’s clickstream, and it really looks like that account should be yours, but it also knows that it’s been a while and so it might now be a guest, and so has logged you out temporarily. But it doesn’t just want to spawn a new temporary clickstream that they’ll have to re-correlate to your account later, because that’s costly to server resources in the O(N) case, and in 90% of cases, it still is you browsing.
At least for me, there's an "X" in the upper-right corner that dismisses the popup. I can also click anywhere outside the popup to dismiss it. Is that not the case for you?
Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s enabled by default or if they use some bullshit dark patterns to coerce users into opting in - it’s in Medium’s best interests to do so as they get a cut of any profits.
Why is it always Medium that's blamed for this but not mainstream news websites? I'm pretty sure I've been paywalled by sites like NYT yet people keep posting links to them.
That's what people get when they take promises of any kind seriously. I'm not excusing Medium, but at the same time I'm not going to hold some kind of false expectation over their head.
Oh, but we should hold it over their head. We very much should. Cynicism only hurts us and leaves us with a poorer way to communicate. Cynicism benefits Medium.
Because Medium doesn’t author anything. It’s as if NYT consisted of nothing but “letters to the editor” (without an editor and not in response to anything that was previously published, because they would be publishing nothing in the equivalent scenario) and then decided to put up a paywall.
There are countless free (and even ad-free) text-only hosting options available. Medium provides nothing of value to me as a consumer. It doesn’t even aggregates the content, people selectively post it to Medium themselves!
I say this as someone that pays for about a dozen online newspaper/magazine subscriptions but will never pay a penny to access a site like Medium or Scribd or Quora or any other site that does nothing but make money off being the middle man.
Anyway, it’s all moot as Medium will inevitably shutter or pivot. Their model is dead, the only reason people chose to post to Medium is because it offered some views. If those views are killed off by requiring a paywall, then Medium itself becomes defunct.
> Medium provides nothing of value to me as a consumer.
The value is that it's providing a platform to authors who want a platform where they know they'll get readers. I personally don't choose to use Medium anymore, but it's very easy to get people to read your content on there. In the past I've used places like Wordpress, Blogger, my own webpages, etc., and it took a lot more effort to get people to see your content. Whereas on Medium, it didn't take long to get people to look at my content. Few things I wrote went into a black hole.
> I say this as someone that pays for about a dozen online newspaper/magazine subscriptions but will never pay a penny to access a site like Medium or Scribd or Quora or any other site that does nothing but make money off being the middle man.
They make money by being a platform to voices you might not otherwise hear because newspapers and magazines pick and choose a small set of authors to write most of their content. If that's not your cup of tea, then it's not your cup of tea.
I choose not to use Medium as an author, but I understand why people choose to publish on it and why some people would choose to pay for it.
> Anyway, it’s all moot as Medium will inevitably shutter or pivot.
Like every other business conceivably?
> If those views are killed off by requiring a paywall, then Medium itself becomes defunct.
How are you supposed to read anything if _mediums_ don't exist? That's the value Medium provides to readers, and clearly Medium has a lot of reach, flawed their platform may be. It's not mind-blowing, but there it is.
You do realize that an author's own blog or site is hosted on a platform of some kind, right? Authors wouldn't be choosing Medium over setting up a Wordpress instance on HostGator if it wasn't easier and didn't get them readers.
You can choose to not read Medium articles, but authors are using it for a reason.
I've never heard of the WikiHow site. It's one of a near-infinite number of engrish permutations that is never ranked in any of my searches or my parents' or my wife's. For a moment, I suspected I was missing out on something...nope.
Hopefully written and illustrated in genuine wikihow style