One of the depressing facts of the current year (decade? century?) is that the Information Super Highway is being commonly used for anything but. The original promise of this highway was that our education would be enhanced, or in some ways super charged. And that's true in some aspects, surely. It seems like if anything can be known, there's a Wikipedia page, or a 5-10 minute YouTube video that can do a reasonable job of teaching a purveyor something new. That is a big enhancement over the pre-digital age.
On the other hand, consider the reality: "the internet" as it exists to most people is just 1-8 platforms people spend their free time on. Given that these platforms must compete with all other human experience for your eyeballs (to show you ads and collect your data), they became hyper engineered for engagement. We all know this.
But because of this engineering, it seems just, completely impossible to find something worth-while that's written in a blog. I recently wanted to read some Sword & Sorcery, to get a feel for the genre. Instead of a concise list of books, and a few authors, in my search results ("classic Sword and Sorcery books to read") I got:
Now, maybe I got unlucky with the AI black box Google machine. I don't think so. Google, since 2015, has changed their search box to keep you on Google, searching for as long as possible so you see products for as long as possible. As I simply searched again, I eventually got to a few posts giving me the results I wanted.
It's like this for everything. Instead of solving my problem, like you would if you were a customer, my time was actually wasted, so that Google could get more information out of me. On YouTube, videos are incentivized to be ~10 minutes long (better ad spend or something, I don't know), that means if a 30 second video would do, which would save everyone time and money, it gets padded with 9 minutes and 30 seconds of filler content like it's a shounen anime.
It's so gross.