[anotherhue]

My pet theory is that these things happened once the feedback loop for what got clicks kicked in (early 2000s perhaps).

a) The clicks were fake but treated as real to prop up the advertising market, and then fed into the editorial decisions.

b) The clicks were real but we discovered, as others did, that more people click on literal 'clickbait' then on harder to consume, but more authentic content. Short attention spans might also factor in here.

I jump to the oft-repeated story about Google A/B testing a shade of blue (IDK if it's true), versus someone just making a goddamn decision and owning it. We should optimise on our best behaviours, not our average ones.

Perhaps said more succintly, we replaced leadership with local-maxima.