The failure of the Internet to deliver its promise is particularly noticeable when you hunt for repair manuals for a product from the 90s. Used to be, the information would either be there or not there, finable or unfindable.
Now, there are hundreds of algorithmically generated sites claiming to have it just because it appeared in their search logs, generating potemkin village content traps with endless paging, broken-thumbnail named-like-the-file-you-want but actually-just-ebay-photos bullshit
Even if you find the manufacturer's site it’s more likely than not broken, with a search feature that pulls up what it claims are results but empty divs instead of links, or busted jQuery code from 2013 that prevents anything from loading.
Is it a real but broken site? Is it just another click farm? Does it matter?
The payday of AI clickfarms is advertising, because we've built our model of "free internet" on selling Internet ads.
@Leszek_Karlik @crunchysteve I’d even abstract it and say that the payoff is “attention + interaction,” which they can and will monetize in any way they can.
Distributing malware, using the traffic to generate ad clicks, using pass through mechanisms to trick users into solving other sites’ captchas then selling “automated captcha bypassing” as a service, etc.
The common thread is that none of those require any real service to the visitor; in fact that’s an unecessary expense.
Eaton
Crunchysteve
Leszek Karlik