I've always thought such unnecessary padding was primarily to increase search engine ranking (more topic keywords & more length being generally favored). In today's world, almost no one is incentivized to answer your question as concisely as possible. Usually, quite the opposite because satisfying queries faster tends to reduce their metrics (page views, time-on-site, etc).
A secondary contributing cause is that many people aren't very good at structuring explanations. For example, the old rule of thumb that you usually won't miss anything important if you skip the first third of most YouTube how-to videos existed before the algorithm disfavored very short videos (and post-TikTok that's all changed too).
I think the title of this could be more precisely phrased “Stop Giving Me Background Information About My Question, Just Give Me the Answer.”
My go-to example for this is when I once searched for egg substitutes for a baking recipe. Lots of multi-paragraph results about how eggs are nutritious, why eggs are useful in baking, why you might want to substitute them out. Finally after many more paragraphs of non-answers and many ignored ads: my answer, but not in a brief list, a paragraph for each one further explaining what they are.
I go to an LLM for these sorts of questions now and ask it to be brief. The internet for basic questions of any sort lead to these same frustrating webpages otherwise.
Its not clear to me this is an actual problem. I just actually googled "how to fix a Git conflict" and not a single one has multiple paragraphs describing what things are.
The first result [0] pretty much immediately drops into what commands to run. If that result is part of the problem, I fully disagree it is a problem.
Bonus: only one place to update when you realize you have explained it wrong.
TLA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-letter_acronym
A secondary contributing cause is that many people aren't very good at structuring explanations. For example, the old rule of thumb that you usually won't miss anything important if you skip the first third of most YouTube how-to videos existed before the algorithm disfavored very short videos (and post-TikTok that's all changed too).
My go-to example for this is when I once searched for egg substitutes for a baking recipe. Lots of multi-paragraph results about how eggs are nutritious, why eggs are useful in baking, why you might want to substitute them out. Finally after many more paragraphs of non-answers and many ignored ads: my answer, but not in a brief list, a paragraph for each one further explaining what they are.
I go to an LLM for these sorts of questions now and ask it to be brief. The internet for basic questions of any sort lead to these same frustrating webpages otherwise.
The first result [0] pretty much immediately drops into what commands to run. If that result is part of the problem, I fully disagree it is a problem.
[0]: https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-...