What is a well known 'public secret' in the industry you work in that the majority of outsiders are unaware of?

NotSpez@lemm.ee to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 629 points –
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Magazines are routinely reprinting articles from the last year every year again, slightly changed. Especially timeless stuff like "Why is tick season so bad this year?" or "This is how you bake the perfect apple pie".

There are stock news site that churn out "why did $STOCK move in $DIRECTION" filled with bullshit speculation. I bet it was mostly automated even before chatGPT and has gotten much worse now.

Yeah ad sites. Usually they steal blog posts on the topic. Or just copy paste the top SEO spot. Then they highjack the spot and rake in the clicks.

Like 60% of the first page results in an engine are often these types of sites. They add nothing but noise.

To be fair in this subfield even the articles written by real humans are often speculative at best. Stock markets are influenced by millions of individual decisions (most of which are in themselves carried out by digital algorithms) and there isn't a single narrative responsible for a stock's course. It's much like the weather in that regard.

The development is certainly extant though. In newspapers many of the shorter, repetitive snippets have been machine generated for a long time now. I'm talking about summaries of sports matches with sentences like "but then just before half time scored to . You just feed the program a table with who scored goals at which minute and it generates it for you.

I can't wait to learn how to make pecan pie next year!

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