Article writers - just stop before you kill somebody!

[lklein]

Well I think everyone already knew about all the crap out there. Hopefully the reader is smart enough to realized it.

People have really wreck things trying to make a few bucks. Look at all the useless adsense sites oit there. It's really hard to search and find revelent info sometimes.

[Bewley]

Originally Posted by Hyaku_Man

There are always going to be vultures and slackers out there, that will never change unless consumers wise up. I'm often pretty surprised by how much the average person assigns authority to webpages. If it's written on a webpage, a lot of people (let's say over age 40) assume it's written by an expert. They just don't understand the medium and that anyone can put content online.

I have had many years experience of teaching 40+ year old surfers how to use a computer and navigate round the Internet.

I really think that what you say above is too much of a generalisation. Common sense, or lack of it, is not exclusive to a specific age group.

I would go further, and add that a lot of older web surfers tend to err more on the side of caution - paying for goods and services online, as one example.

A lot of my peers (well beyond the age of 40) go to great lengths to establish the veracity and authority of most things that they read on the web.

Most of them, having been 'round the block' several times, approach a lot of things they encounter on the web with a cynical and critical eye.

The younger web users, in my experience, tend to readily take on-board web based information, based on face value, and are more ready to adopt the belief 'that if it is on the web, then it must be true'.

Of course, 'desperation' and 'need' tends to circumvent most semblance of common sense - from the insecure teenager through to the desperately ill senior.

A lot of article marketers are fully aware of this and a few are prepared to maximise their profits by preying on the vulnerable and desperate - without a second thought to any possible adverse consequence, whether that consequence could be financial or personally harmful to the reader/prospective buyer.

It is heartening to see the ethical stance most of the posters adopt throughout this thread - the sooner we can rid the web of the crap and garbage and the misleading and downright dangerous, the better.