Your average person never gave a shit about good content. That's the proof that's been visible for centuries, where there were newspapers, there were tabloids with giant click-bait headlines to make a quick buck and it always worked, because people don't want to read, they want just a headline to tell them how to feel.
But those average people are the majority of "views" of said paper, that's why all these media outlets are desperate for that ad revenue. They already have subscriber bases that are actual real interest in reading content.
Welcome to the sad reality of our world, crack open a cold one and laugh with the rest of us.
Such an insufferable quote. The vast majority of people aren’t stupid in any sense of the word just because they have different priorities than what the over zealous “smart people” think makes one smart.
It's not just different priorities. The average person will more consistently act against their own self-interests (eg their own priorities) because they simply cannot reason well enough to choose the best path forwards for themselves.
According to whom? In my experience people tend to think they know what’s best for others and call them stupid when they do what they consider best. It’s almost always different priorities with one persons priorities being considered the “obviously best path forward.”
- a more technical, intelligent, and successful userbase
than the average website.
Or are you really trying to imply that it (and it's users) are not much different from, say, Reddit or a Fox News's comment section or TikTok or Facebook?
HN is full of people that think they are smart about everything because they have above average knowledge in technology. I can not even start counting the number of uninformed but confident comments I have read here about my non-technology fields.
The problem is these people were told that software was going to eat the world, so they anointed themselves as Certified Experts In Everythingology and think their garbage takes are the word of god.
Human intelligence is arguably not even truly ordinal, let alone cardinal. No one who reasonably understands human intelligence believes it's as simple as a normal distribution. IQ is defined as a normal distribution but that doesn't mean the difference between 100 to 110 IQ is comparable to the difference between 140 and 150 IQ. If you boil "human intelligence" down to nothing more than IQ, sure, but in reality there's no such thing as a mean here and median is tenuous as well.
Indeed, and also, same as it ever was. Before the dominance of the internet, television was the dominant structure of media, it is also jam packed full of ads and shitty "click-bait" news. As you allude to, that's just life.
The big difference today is that they're trying the same shit on protocols and platforms that allow you to block anything you want, so it's an arms race between blockers and DRM enforcers. Eventually, they'll just split HTTP into the Web side and the App side. The App side will be encumbered with EME and other anti-standards drafted by WHATWG.
But those average people are the majority of "views" of said paper, that's why all these media outlets are desperate for that ad revenue. They already have subscriber bases that are actual real interest in reading content.
Welcome to the sad reality of our world, crack open a cold one and laugh with the rest of us.