Comment by jonshariat
18 hours ago
Agree but also want to point out that this started with the SEO boom of the last decade where sites started rambling so they would keep you on the site longer and get more SEO "points", they were articles meant for a robot to catch humans.
AI has made it even worse and lots of content on the web, for both these reasons, is not worth you time (now wonder users don't read most of the text on our apps!)
In a prior evolution of this, if you look into the Get Rich Quick marketing copy of the early 2000s (before SEO had taken over content formatting), you can see a parallel of sorts in those marketers doing human sales optimization Impact with bold and underline. It derives from research into the human response to ads from decades of print ads and centuries of printed matter prior, and I think there is a direct lineage from ‘how can we bias humans through restructuring text’ to ‘how can we bias machines through restructured text’. This isn’t to disagree, but to call out how rapidly humanity (merely twenty years!) has switched from marketing to people, to marketing to algorithms, in search of a favorable bias.
Ah yes I remember meeting this end of spontaneous expression to bend toward whatever might please some algorithm.
Soulless Enshitificatoon Oblivion now exercises a huge weight on societies to such an extent, it's ridiculous.