Stop Explaining What Things Are

Please always explain what things are. All day long I'm following deep links, and nothing bothers me more than people assuming I have perfect context.

Its not clear to me this is an actual problem. I just actually googled "how to fix a Git conflict" and not a single one has multiple paragraphs describing what things are.

The first result [0] pretty much immediately drops into what commands to run. If that result is part of the problem, I fully disagree it is a problem.

[0]: https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-...

I think the title of this could be more precisely phrased “Stop Giving Me Background Information About My Question, Just Give Me the Answer.”

My go-to example for this is when I once searched for egg substitutes for a baking recipe. Lots of multi-paragraph results about how eggs are nutritious, why eggs are useful in baking, why you might want to substitute them out. Finally after many more paragraphs of non-answers and many ignored ads: my answer, but not in a brief list, a paragraph for each one further explaining what they are.

I go to an LLM for these sorts of questions now and ask it to be brief. The internet for basic questions of any sort lead to these same frustrating webpages otherwise.

I agree that this is annoying, but you answered your own question about why this is the way it is.

> You *Google* “how to fix a Git conflict”, and every result ... is ... *"SEO-stuffed* filler drowning ... the answer.

Mate, you've searched something using Google, and the results you're looking at have been optimized to appear at the top of Google search results. So why are you surprised by this?

Your quibble, if it's with anyone, is with Google and why they value this kind of content (why filling the page with valueless drivel makes it more likely to appear in search results).

    $ apropos 'merge conflict'
    git-mergetool (1)    - Run merge conflict resolution tools to resolve merge conflicts

I’m amazed no one has mentioned AI in this thread. The nice thing about LLMs is that, in a way, the framing of the question serves to “seed” the LLM with the context about who is asking. Ask something specific, and it will assume you already know what you’re talking about and give you only what you need.

I totally agree, but with the caveat of: don't use TLAs without at least a single use of the term in full or a wiki link!

TLA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-letter_acronym

But SEO

I've always thought such unnecessary padding was primarily to increase search engine ranking (more topic keywords & more length being generally favored). In today's world, almost no one is incentivized to answer your question as concisely as possible. Usually, quite the opposite because satisfying queries faster tends to reduce their metrics (page views, time-on-site, etc).

A secondary contributing cause is that many people aren't very good at structuring explanations. For example, the old rule of thumb that you usually won't miss anything important if you skip the first third of most YouTube how-to videos existed before the algorithm disfavored very short videos (and post-TikTok that's all changed too).

Is this just rage-bait?

I'm in two minds about this. Some articles add useless information in the beginning in cases where I just want a quick fix for the issue. But then there are some instances where knowing how that particular thing works can give me context on what is going on and how it can be fixed. I'm guessing it all depends on the problem and how much time you want to invest in solving it.