The Gurus aren’t Dead, you just can’t hear them
…through all the noise.
In audio engineering one of THE cardinal parameters is signal to noise ratio, or the level of desired sounds compared to the undesired sounds. Technically, noise is a pretty specific thing, but I have zero issues with the concept being applied to something like cymbals bleeding into the tom tom microphones as well.
This is where we are with information. Type something BASIC about nearly any technical subject. Five years ago, it was very likely that you would hit upon a technical society that catalogs this information, some forums dedicated to that information, some websites of enthusiasts or experts in that field and a few videos on the subject. You might also get some ads about it.
Today, you will get ads. You will get ads disguised to look like expert information. You will get paid to rank pages that may or may not have any relevance to the subject, but you can bet will have ads or affiliate links on them. And then you get the videos. Alleged experts, mostly MLM and/or Megachurch types. All hype. All clickbait. Long videos in order to fall correctly into YouTube’s insane Adpocalypse algos. Videos that could have been done in 30 seconds but instead are 8 minutes of hype nonsense.
SEO. If you run a business or even have a website you will constantly hear from SEO scammers. Search Engine Optimization they call it. While once upon a time, there were some best practices to make sure your site was actually caught by the engines, today this usually means a total scam, someone just stealing your money and doing nothing for you, or at “best” a scam against the people of the world, where they do shady, unethical garbage in order to push your website higher up in the “organic” ranking.
All this means that information that used to be dreadfully easy to get five years ago is damn near impossible to find now. I had to put on my website, information as mundane as the thickness of various Floyd Rose tremolo shims. I running tally of available 8 channel ADAT interfaces, audio interface latency readings, all sorts of things that when some chode says “Let Me Google That For You” really could have been caught a few years ago. Not today.
What can we do to preserve searchable information? My website and some facebook groups are small pins against the swords of spam. Where do we go from here?
