Stop Publishing Garbage on the Internet

I’m offended by crappy writing.

Anna Burgess Yang
4 min readJan 27, 2023
a waste basket overflowing with papers, pop art
Image created via Midjourney

I didn’t plan to write today.

I woke up and joked (in my brain, to myself) that I didn’t want to contribute to “garbage on the internet.” Even though this is my normal day to publish, I didn’t have anything that I thought was worth sharing. And writing for the sake of writing isn’t worth it to me.

Then I found some blog posts published by a company I was once fond of.

And now I’m mad.

Because it was such utter crap that it was insulting as a writer. And insulting to readers. And insulting to words in general.

How did we get here?

At some point in the History of The Internet, companies started publishing blogs.

I remember the early days when having a blog seemed to indicate a level of legitimacy as a company: the writing may not be great, but at least the company is taking the time to put something out into the world. And in those early days, maybe the blog was no more than an employee who had some extra time and decent writing skills.

Then content marketing emerged. Blogs became a traffic driver through search engine optimization (SEO). Companies raced to publish content that would appear near the top of…

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Anna Burgess Yang

Freelance Writer. Operations Advice for Solopreneurs. Career pivots are fun. 🎉 https://start.annabyang.com/