Spam-Spam-Spam-Spam-Spam: This is the best article I have seen in at least a year about the advertising-attention-ecosystem-driven en****ification of the world wide web, making it a hive of scum and villainy rather than a useful information utility. Nilay Patel is a genius, and the genius of this article is that it makes its point and also makes an example of its point by also partaking of the quintessence of SEO-spam, and thus is both en****ified and not en****ified in a positive Schrödinger’s Cat superposition of the Last Days of the Useful Web:

Nilay Patel: Best printer 2024, best printer for home use, office use, printing labels, printer for school, homework printer you are a printer we are all printers/After a full year of not thinking about printers, the best printer is still whatever random Brother laser printer that’s on sale: ‘Tech/Artificial Intelligence…. It’s been over a year since I last told you to just buy a Brother laser printer, and that article has fallen down the list of Google search results because I haven’t spent my time loading it up with fake updates every so often to gain the attention of the Google search robot. It’s weird because the correct answer to the query “what is the best printer” has not changed, but an entire ecosystem of content farms seems motivated to constantly update articles about printers in response to the incentive structure created by that robot’s obvious preferences. Pointing out that incentive structure and the culture that’s developed around it seems to make a lot of people mad, which is also interesting!… My only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out…<theverge.com/2024/4/2/2…>