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We are in a weird internet time where if you consume something online, it's there because somebody has spent time and money -- sometimes a lot of it -- to make it that way. This is true of both brands and individual content providers. That doesn't make the content wrong or bad, but it means that the diverging incentives between producers and consumers is going to continue a drift towards easy, mediocre, engaging material and true deep-dive information, even with tech articles. The net went from "search, find the source, deep-dive, make tentative judgments" (like one would do at a library doing research) to "search, pop-in, see the listicle five-minute fact-bomb explainer vid, then assume you know everything important there is to know." (as one might do, say, browsing items as a yard sale). If you're looking for true knowledge, you're going to have to deal with this more and more. It's a tend that's continuing, not some current state of affairs. If you're looking to be entertained and waste time playing games and absorbing random trivia and political justifications for things you already believe, you're in luck: a lot of people and a lot of money are hard at work to keep you happy. |