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A lot of it is for entertainment, even when it’s infotainment. News reporting, Wikipedia, current affairs podcast, Tweets, Reddit, Hacker News comments, etc. The inaccuracies here aren’t that important, because the vast majority of this content is just being consumed for dopamine hits and not actually putting the information to use.

Some of it is out of necessity. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that many people use Stack Overflow, and though some of the answers there are very good, others aren’t. If someone needs help with a specific problem they’ll often post a question somewhere (Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc.), and the quality of the answer they get is a roll of the die - even whether they’ll get an answer at all.

Some of it is because blog spam has made traditional searches much more difficult. There’s another comment that says that there are comments better than Reddit and Hacker News, but if you go into a discussion about Google you’ll find that a lot of people have been doing things such as appending “reddit.com” to searches because otherwise they’ll drown in a mountain of blog spam.



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