Same for restaurants, fitness, investing, cooking, Linux, etc.
Yelp, AllTrails, etc exist for a reason. A whole swath of internet users seem allergic to looking things up, instead of asking about their own use case. (What’s there to do for a 16 year old? What’s there to do for a 17 year old? Etc etc)
Laziness is human nature. And it may even be a feature, not a bug.
That said, the problem also attributable to how much more content there is- it the amount of data is overwhelming, the rise in clickbait and content farmers dampens the signal-to-noise ratio, and so sometimes the mere act of asking people, even anonymous people on an online community, feels more authentic and reliable.
In my opinion the internet is ruined (is it really?) by greed. Slowly we accept ads in our streams, run software on other peoples machines to allow others to take control, have our darkest secrets about our interests tracked by invisible and malignant scripts on every website.
How unimaginative are you that you would share it all with advertisers? And I though internet destroyed my fantasy...
Even if that was all predictable, you can still be angry of course.
I think substituting data for wisdom is a big part of the problem.
If we get what we measure and we're measuring greed metrics, what's the surprise?
Clicks, users (ironically named), leads. Data is great for spotting and creating problems, but not so good at coming up with solutions.
More data won't eliminate greed, but it can help in exploiting greed for more greed, so more data it is.
Politicians and advertisers have been data driven for decades. Look where that got us.
Is anyone doing data analysis on the effects of greed on the economic well being of citizens? That would be ironic.
It seems like until the data says what we want it to say, there's a problem with the data. Maybe the problem is outsourcing being humans to data.
Sorry for the rant, thanks for reading.
