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magic-michael | 1 year ago

Can you show me where the garbage content is? They seem to all have experts that have written in these areas for decades.

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alwa|1 year ago

Well… that’s the crux of the discomfort. These brands’ newsrooms do in fact have those people. That’s the reason their names inspire trust.

Now, they’ve decided to cash out that trust by lending their names to sleazy content farming affiliate marketer types.

For now, that’s valuable, since people (and Google) trust the names based on what they used to do—and they distrust the rest of the endless chorus of hucksters. But sooner or later, the world realizes there’s no longer good reason to trust those names. They’re just snake oil (and CBD gummy) salesmen like the rest.

And then we’re left without popular institutions that are trustworthy when we need to understand complicated and true things about the world. And we’ve punished people (and Google) for even trying to place more weight on honest reportage and institutional signals of expertise.