Yuck
I've written about this before, but I can't seem to get it out of my mind.It's so hard to find a website with limited content. Worse, much of the content is totally out of their alleged area of expertise. Almost every website has their own Wirecutter imitation section making recommendations on hundreds of projects they've "tested." Tom's Hardware testing blenders? Sure you have.
Even Wirecutter is far from the mission of the New York Times. I miss the days when the Times was a newspaper, and choices had to be made about which content to include. That forced quality upwards. Now, though, damn near everything in the dumpster gets included.
It makes sense if you consider what businesses are trying to do. In the newspaper and magazine era, it was to inform/influence. Now the only consideration is engagement. Websites will put anything out there to make people stay because then they can serve more advertising.
I like ChatGPT, and it's great for serving information without ads, but it's still only summarizing everything it scrapes off the Web, and most of what is available to scrape is garbage. If the big promise of AI was to serve bad content in a more convenient package, it wouldn't have sounded so promising.
I'd feel better if I saw a way out of this, but I don't. Enshittification is unstoppable.
<< Home