El gato malo has coined a neat phrase: “the reputation economy.” With the vast dispersal and availability of information, a reputation for integrity and honesty is becoming an increasing valuable personal and professional asset. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:
watch as the reputation economy eats sci-pub
as any system gets established and later ossified, those in and around it learn to game it. they optimize their behavior to drive success within the system and, many times, this has deleterious effects on the system itself, breaking it into something more akin to algorithm races as opposed to serving any useful purpose.
SEO (search engine optimization) is a classic example. google achieved dominance in the web search space and the web responded by making all their web pages into bizarre monstrosities targeted not so much at readers as at the google algo. it turns the search result increasingly into gibberish or worse, into annoying advertising forests full of aggravating content that simply will NOT tell you what you want to know. it keeps answers out of thumbnails, foregrounds sensationalist clickbait headlines, and buries even simple things like “recipe for lasagna” deep in stupid stories that have 9 paragraphs of text before the story. (useful fact: you can fix this by adding “reddit” to your search terms for recipes. try it. the results are striking.)
and this is why google is going to lose the search space. AI will eat them alive and it’s becoming manifestly clear that the bizarre, woke, untrained AI’s the googleplex are putting out are un-useful save as parody.
the results speak for themselves.
the results speak for themselves.
