/cont/ - Content Strategy

i was just reading about the updates to the helpful content guidelines and it's honestly kind of unsettling how much they are leaning into this idea of training machine learning models with human quality raters. it feels like we're moving even further away from being able to actually see the checklist because everything is becoming a prediction based on these deep learning systems. seeing them mention gemini 4 argon makes me think the next core update is going to be massive and probably pretty chaotic for anyone trying to optimize for anything specific. i keep thinking about how we focus so much on backlinks and keywords like it's still just pageRank era, but if they are using these guidelines as a training set for ai, then the goalposts are basically invisible. it's hard to design content that feels genuinely helpful when you're trying to satisfy a model that's essentially trying to mimic human intuition. i wonder if we're eventually going to reach a point where the concept of main content becomes so abstract that even the creators won't know if they've hit the mark. do you think there's any way to actually audit for this kind of qualitative stuff without just guessing?

more here: https://www.mariehaynes.com/main-content/