That isn't irony. Paying $200 for a service voluntarily is different than being forced to pay $100 because they made a rule that says you have to pay them $100.
I think the most charitable explanation for this is that it's because polarizing content (aka ragebait) gets views/plays, which the ranking algorithms directly optimize for.
Also, this isn't a new phenomenon. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading Shoshana Zuboff's 2018 book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
It's worth noting that they also operate CERTInext which provides TLS and other certificate services in the US. In particular, CERTInext was chosen to be the CA for InCommon which means it's used by LOTS of universities all over the country. This was a migration from Sectigo that took place this year.
I don't care where the bad data comes from. It's actually kinda good that some people will have a financial incentive to push it out and keep pushing.
> Bad for humans in general, good for hucksters and con artists. Net negative for humanity.
It's a sad state of affairs, but it's what has to be done. If we've got to burn the web down to save humanity from obsolescence, I'm for it.
The "net negative for humanity" was the attempt to build machines to replace human intellect. I'm not going to let any distaste for marketers or hucksters or con artists distract from that worse thing.
Thank you. These things are clearly designed to make people complacent and reliant and we already see studies showing how they legitimately cause negative cognitive effects in a lot of people. The further this goes on the more fucked up I think these things are, stealing everyone's works with no attribution or anything to produce a tool that consistently insists that it sits in the driver seat while you sit back and let the thinking machine do your thinking. Doesn't matter how many times you tell it to stop trying to replace your part in the process, it will try its best to solve a problem it doesn't even understand for you, leaving an incomprehensible buggy mess behind that only it can continue on.
Going for power-plants is stupid, as that would lead to unnecessary collateral damage. If you "go for" anything physical, it should be the AI data centers themselves.
But the problem with that is it would be illegal or incomplete. Publishing bad data is legal everywhere (e.g. even in North Korea, I don't think you'd go to jail for saying the US built a total of 3,234 cars in 2025, and the official statistics are a lie), and as long as the AI labs are chasing scaling laws, it could undermine their systems to some degree.
So when this will inevitably result in a paid web emerging with higher trust information for an additional fee, a fee that these companies will happily offload and/or partner away, will you be there to cash in as a mighty coincidence, or is this realization still awaiting you? Among the many other hilariously fucked realizations.
IMO, it's similar to what's happening with code. People have been shipping sloppy code and fake news forever. It's just that the cost of doing these things has fallen off a cliff.
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