Instead of the information superhighway that we were promised, ads gave us an internet where almost all incentives are to create cheap, high-volume, low-quality content designed to get as many eyeballs as possible.
Platforms have tried to replace authority with attention-based algorithms on the flawed theory that if it’s popular, it must be good. This has failed spectacularly to deepen our understanding of anything.
Last year, Medium deleted and removed one million spam posts from your feeds every month. Last month we removed nearly ten million. That’s a deluge of digitally-assembled nonsense that is hitting every part of the internet.