Freelancer, Heal Thyself... Dummy!

A freelance writer?

Our staff at the Antisocial Network is mainly composed of scientists and do-it-yourselfers, which is certainly why we almost never call out anyone for bad relationship or beauty advice. Keeping that in mind, it's pretty likely that there are few if any books of the self-help variety on our personal bookshelves and eReaders. We're mostly of the opinion that the only "help" most self-help books create is help for the author's bank account. With that in mind, we decided to delve into a peculiar corner of the genre, freelancers telling other freelancers how to make money. That's where we ran into Trisha Wright (aka dlwright or Trisha Faulkner), a former squid who moved most of her content to WritEdge.com. That includes an article she called "Skills Every Freelancer Should Have."¹

Temperature Conversions for Dummies (Metric System 6)

Here at the Antisocial Network we absolutely love the sight of another self-appointed freelancer trying to collect more of those all-holy dollars by providing misinformation on a topic the average sixth-grader could handle with aplomb. Take, for instance, the thousands – if not millions – of badly-written, misguided, and just plain wrong articles about the metric system: just about any middle-schooler who's been paying attention in class (we know, we know: a small sample size) has a better handle on the topic than these greedy adults. Today's example comes from the depths of Suite.io (formerly Suite101.com) where James Hutchinson made a mess of "Celsius to Fahrenheit Temperature Conversion."¹

Oh, heck, even the most addle-brained fifth-grade student knows that there are simple formulas for going back and forth between the two temperature scales. Hutchinson, however, decided that someone somewhere needed another conversion version a few hundred words long. It's too bad that he also decided to include a little ambiguity and a collection of downright errors... errors like these:

Transposition for the Dummy Composer

Cleveland playing a trumpet?

We'll be honest here: nobody on staff here at the Antisocial Network has had any music lessons in longer than we'd like to think about (and none have had any composing or theory classes). Oh, sure, several of us played in high-school bands and a couple have tried desperately to learn the guitar (several times), but the truth is most of our musical expertise plays out in the car or the shower these days. So it goes. But that doesn't mean that we're so completely out of it that the instructions by eHow.com's Cleveland van Cecil (yet another freelancer nom de plume intended, we suspect to protect the guilty) didn't strike a sour note. Get it? a music joke? Whatever. Anyway, Cleveland is definitely not the person we would ask to explain "How to Change Trumpet Notes to Match Guitar Chords" at OurPastimes.com, nosiree, Bob...

Though we can be reasonably sure Cleve took a music appreciation class to get that BA in Liberal Arts of his, apparently he didn't ever actually take a music class. That's why, when performing a copy-reword-paste job on his question, he got something wrong. 

Trapdoor or Chute, the Dummy Version

This is a laundry chute, dummy!

Laundry chutes were a common feature of classic houses, especially ones built in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. The concept was surprisingly simple: instead of schlepping your dirty clothing from the second (or third) floor of the house down to a laundry room in the basement, builders installed a slick-sided chute inside the walls and let gravity work its magic on soiled clothing. Why modern houses don't have these conveniences any more comes as a mystery to our staff (and to many others, we note). Well, Novel Treasure over at HubPages.com decided she and hubby needed one,  so they proceeded to create their own – and then she wrote a-a-a-all about it in "How to Install a Laundry Chute in the Floor." That seems to be par for the course for the women of the HubPages.com niche "dengarden" when it comes to DIY: perform a little household project (or watch someone else do it) and then write a "how-to."

Ogee Gutters for Dummies

Shape of an ogee curve

One of the common errors of the freelancing fool (the kind of writer who "researches" questions and "answers" them at content farms or a blog) is failure to comprehend the point of the question. Take, for instance, the question "What is ethanol?" A freelance fool would "inform" you that ethanol is a mixture of gasoline and alcohol, while failing to mention that the word is more specifically used for ethyl alcohol. eHow.com's Chasity Goddard, freelance "writer" by virtue of a BA in creative writing, demonstrates this class of error by completely missing the point when writing about an unfamiliar topic: "What Are Ogee Gutters?"¹

Light Years for Dummies

Way back in 2011, the search-engine gurus at Google decided that enough is enough: crappy websites filled with poorly-written garbage were getting what they felt was excessively high placement in search results. Consequently, the company released their Panda update to demote the content farms. Facebook and Twitter were given prominence in the algorithm, and the baby was thrown out with the Suite.com, AssociatedContent and Helium bathwater. Unfortunately, eHow.com managed to survive; as did most of the content responsible for the Panda update. Content that we at the Antisocial Network mock on a near-daily basis; content like "What is the Distance of One Light Year?"¹ covered in the grand old tradition of eHow.com by Jennifer Oster.

Pocket Doors for Remodeling Dummies

Pocket doors with wall covering stripped off

Around the Antisocial Network we ago realized that people are prone to saying just the most idiotic crap when pretending to be more knowledgeable than they really are, you know what we mean? If that weren't the case, then babbling nonsense around smarter – or more accurately, better-prepared – people wouldn't be a go-to plot point for just about every situation comedy episode ever written. Babbling incomprehensibly (while still looking pretty) was Penny's sole schtick for the first season or two of "Big Bang Theory," right? Well, freelancers out there pumping and dumping their copy-rewrite-paste bullshit onto write-for-cash sites are every bit as prone as sitcom characters to saying stupid things while pretending to be knowledgeable. Take Seekyt.com's Ellina James, who was already in a hole when she chose the title "Advantages and drawbacks of Closet Doors."

Volcanoes for Dummies

Volcano

It's been more than six months since the Antisocial Network hosted tectonics week, and we're happy to announce that our staff geologist has returned from the "spa" where he'd been "vacationing." It took quite a while for him to recover from the effects of the avalanche of idiocy he uncovered during his research, but he's tells us he's ready to get back in the saddle again: what a brave guy, eh? So without further ado, let's see what utter bull Suite.io's Angela Schnaubelt scribbled down to "inform" her readers about "Understanding Mountains and Volcanoes."¹ Let's hope the poor guy survives this new shock...

Parquet Floors for Dummy Redecorators (Carpentry Week 5)

Parquet flooring

Here at the Antisocial Network, we absolutely love it when we can catch someone who doesn't know anything about a topic holding forth about it at some length. The content is often full of clues that they're talking through the proverbial hat – all the little miscues and bits of misinformation; sometimes augmented by a big boo-boo or two. We recently caught up with Seekyt.com's Melissa Hamler (the Melissa Hamler from Australia, not the Melissa Hamler from Indianapolis) who was doing exactly that in a post she entitled "Additions of Parquet Floors" (now attributed to "general contributor [who apparently outranks private contributor]m, but still Hamler's words).

Oil Business Salaries for Dummies

Where's the crane? the mudroom?
the medic's office? the radio...

From about 2007 to 2014, the US "oil patch" experienced a huge boom. At the same time, the rest of the economy languished in the doldrums, a differential that meant that a lot of people were eager to find a job in that industry. Naturally, job-seekers wanted to know the potential for earnings, and eHow.com's Denise Brandenberg (a self-appointed "expert" on salaries) was there to tell them a-a-all about it in "The Average Salary for an Oil Rig"¹ (ob. hack: we have to wonder whether that rig is eligible for dental and vision insurance...).

Central Air Conditioning for Dummies

Parts of a central air conditioning system

Next to misinformation, plain and simple, the second greatest sin of the money-hungry freelancer has to be spun content. Where the misinformers take on subjects outside their experience and make a mess of facts and figures, spinners just take the words of another and run them through a synonym-generation app. Spinners with good writing skills can carry this off as long as they don't mung up the facts. Spinners who lack the skills -- many of them, apparently, based in non-English-speaking countries -- just pump out pure drivel. Take, for instance, InfoBarrel.com's vilhuman1975, addressing the topic of "Considerations For Central Air Conditioning."¹ 

Decks for Clueless Dummies

Adding a deck

We're all familiar with the "Steves" and "Esthers" who answer the phone when we call customer service. You know, the ones with the suspiciously thick accents and the endless apologies. Well, fake North Americans abound among freelancers, too. Take Infobarrel's noryanna, who claims to have grown up in the "rural American mid-west [sic]" and to have been a Peace Corps volunteer. Yeah, right: based on her content, it's readily apparent that this scammer is unlikely to have ever set foot in North America, much less be a native. Just take a look at "Adding A Deck To Your House" at InfoBarrel...

Riddle us this: would a native English speaker from the "American mid-west" (where the word is only hyphenated by new immigrants) introduce building a deck this way?

Radon for Dummies (Seekyt Week 6)

Radon

Apparently, for a while the favored method of driving eyeballs to your freelance content (thereby increasing residual income) was to ask some ridiculous, preferably scary-sounding, question. We suppose that beats the current favorites, the "one simple trick" and "you'll never believe" click-bait we've all come to hate... Whatever the case, the question posed by today's dumbass, Seekyt's TeenageGeek, sure sounds scary: "Are you exposing yourself to Radiation in your sleep?" According to the Geek, the answer is (always) "Yes"; of course, since he (or perhaps she) is here to inform us about radon. Or perhaps we should say "misinform" us about radon...

Let's begin where TeenageGeek began, with the introduction:

Bay Windows for Utter Dummies (Seekyt Week 5)

Bay window... on a bathroom???

Among the many things we never intend to do is put a big-ass window in our bathroom. Oh, sure, if we lived alone in an isolated house that no one could approach because of the 12-foot wall around the property and the killer guard dogs that roam the grounds. Such delicacy, however, is apparently not in the makeup of Seekyt's manojjh (Manoj Jha), apparently an employee of a large India-based window company. No, Manoj finds the idea completely acceptable, and even gives explicit... well, not really... instructions in "How To Install A Bay Window In Your Bathroom?" (the question mark is Manoj's, not ours).

As is so often the case at Seekyt (and elsewhere), Manoj's "instructions" are rather inane. He begins by telling you to

English for the Dummy Client (Seekyt Week 4)

Tracking corrections in MS Word

"Physician heal thyself!" may have originally been a literal suggestion to Jesus Christ (Luke 4:23), but these days its use is rather snarkier. It means something along the lines of "don't criticize others for what you do yourself." Perhaps the more accurate Biblical quotation would be something about motes and beams... Today's dumbass, courtesy of the truly moronic site Seekyt.com, is one Victoria Trix ("real" name Victoria Carella? publishing under the pseudonym "Trixxie," perhaps out of shame?) We caught the lovely Victoria lecturing her potential clients about whom they should hire for freelancing jobs (why, it's her of course!) in "Benefits of an English Speaking Writer vs. Non-English Speaking Writers."

Of course, according to Trixxie, English-speaking writers are better than non-English-speaking writers. That makes sense, since anything you write in a language you don't speak at all will probably end up total gibberish. So what Trixxie probably means is "non-native English speakers"; though we can't be sure. But let's face it: Trixxie is definitely a dumbass for having written this balderdash:

Gibberish for Dummies (Seekyt Week 3)

Gastrointestinal tract

What kind of internet content would be worse than advertising disguised as (bad) advice? We asked ourselves that question quite some time ago and weren't really sure there was something worse. At least not until we ran into some Seekyt garbage called "How to get free motions? Some advice for staying fit and healthy," posted by a member calling himself rakhi143 (we call him Rakhi). After we read that one, we were pretty sure that gibberish written only for the purposes of self-promotion is just a little worse.

Why self-promotion? Because Rakhi has four links with his Seekyt referral code in the post, and a quick survey of his profile shows that he uses the same first paragraph – with three referral links – for every post. We might have let him get away with that sort of bullshit if his content were... coherent. But it's not. Take a gander at this hot mess:

Screw Sizes for Dummies

Types of screws

Did you take a shop class when you were in seventh grade? The carpenter we keep on our staff here at the Antisocial Network did. That's where she learned about metal fasteners like nails, nuts and bolts, wood and screws. When she saw today's dummy content, she said, "It's a good thing I took Shop from Mr. Heller, because otherwise I might have had to get that information from the likes of Joan Whetzel!" Yes indeed, Joanie is back on the pages of the Antisocial Network, here caught at eHow.com expounding on something she calls "Standard Screw Sizes."

In keeping with the typical eHow.com bull pattern, Joan begins with a nonsense introduction:

Foreign Currency for the Dummy Numismatist

Miscellaneous foreign coins (mostly francs)

You'll never know who asked some of the stupid questions that get "answered" by freelancers at eHow.com, but (fortunately for us at the Antisocial Network) you usually know who answers them. You can even follow some of them around from the site's version of a profile page and see what other stupid things they've said. We did precisely that with Tom Lutzenberger, previously caught misinforming the public in Sewer Gas, the Dummy Version. Well, Tom's back today, this time holding forth on another topic about which he apparently knew nothing: "How to Find the Value of Foreign Coins."¹

Choosing Wood for Dummies

Sometimes the Associated Network's dumbass hunters catch their prey in huge mistakes, other times the fakes give themselves away through an accumulation of many small miscues; sort of a "torture of a thousand cuts." Today's DotD nominee, Jeffery Keilholtz, eHow.com contributor, is a classic example of our Type II Dumbass.  For his HomeSteady.com post called "What Kind of Wood Makes the Best Table Legs,"¹ Jeff's little screw-ups add up to a convincing example of faking it. In other words, Keilhotz doesn't know jack about making furniture, and it shows.

The real answer to the question, as any 7th-grade shop teacher would tell you, is "It depends." It depends on whether you're making a reproduction of a 17th-century cherry piece, a Mission-style oak dining table, or a maple Shaker bedside stand. It depends on the intended finish and whether or not the legs will be turned or otherwise shaped. It also depends on what species of wood the top of the table will be made of. Keilholtz, however, doesn't say any of that. Instead, he uses lots of quotes from some other source, and suggests that

Useless Austin Info for? by? Dummies

The hallmark of freelance bullshit on the internet is half-assed information written by people who know jack about the topic. Would you ask your dentist about your bruised pinky toe? hire a plumber to replace your cracked iPhone screen? get advice on Austin, Texas, neighborhoods from someone who lives in Connecticut? Of course not; except if you're dumb enough to trust serial dummy Isabelle Esteves, caught writing about "Buying a New Home in Austin, Texas"¹ at Writedge.com.

Austin skyline

Sure, Austin is "hot"; especially among University of Texas students, many of whom would gladly donate a minor organ to remain in the town after graduation. In point of fact, our office was in Austin for almost a decade, so we have some familiarity with the place; and with the ex-students known as "LTs" because they'd give their Left Testicles to stay in Austin. Not so our Izzy, who clearly knows nothing about the town except for something she scraped off the internet more than a decade ago. The article smells like content she originally published at Helium.com and then resubmitted to Writedge without an update. Why do we say that? Well, because of this asinine statement: