Our Collapsing Information Ecosystem
What’s a Monday morning without a little doomscrolling? I am here to feed your mounting anxiety about the state of the world—you’re welcome! So what fresh hell does this day bring? Just this morning, I stupidly clicked through a link offering me news about “The #1 Brewery in Oregon.” Had I read the full headline—“and see the rest of the top 30, according to Tripadvisor reviews”—I wouldn’t have, but such is the nature of the limbic system. We click before we fully absorb.
These kinds of articles have become a mainstay of click-desperate outlets like MSN because they are super easy to produce and are pretty effective at getting people like me to click. They already account for a lot of the “journalism” on the internet. But look at that screenshot at the top of the post. In this case, MSN didn’t harvest the article from the AP or a traditional newspaper, they ran a piece that came from Stacker. What is Stacker, I wondered? It turns out to be a content mill, of course, but a kind of techbro “disruptor” content mill that makes the information we see online even less reliable than it used to be.
There’s a term for this: enshittification. Cory Doctorow came up with the name and the concept, describing it in a way that perfectly captures what’s going on here: “it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a ‘two-sided market,’ where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.” The listicles like MSN’s weren’t created for us readers. They are a part of monetizing content and tricking readers—and in the process making real information harder and harder to find and identity.
It’s incredibly hard to create a company that uses technology to fix actual problems. It’s a lot easier to create a company that uses technology to enshittify, which is really just hifalutin grifting using software. That appears to be Stacker’s M.O., confirmed by their obfuscatory corporate tech babble: “We are building the first earned distribution platform to maximize the reach and impact of engaging content.” CEO Noah Greenberg does a better job of describing his company when he’s not trying to bury its secret goals under a mountain of jargon. Writing on LinkedIn, he put it this way (edited for brevity):
“Last night someone asked me ‘what does Stacker actually do?’ Say you're the VP of Content at Glassdoor. You spent a decade in journalism, but Glassdoor just hired you to take their proprietary data and put out interesting reports on the job market. Like many brands, Glassdoor realizes that if you are reading great coverage referencing their data, you are more likely to use Glassdoor. So you put out a ton of great content - state of the job market, deep dives on the gender pay gap, etc. Only 1 problem.... no one is going to the Glassdoor blog.
And that's where Stacker comes in. We've gone out and partnered with 3,000 news outlets - from Hearst and McClatchy Newspapers to MSN and AOL - who turn to Stacker to curate the best content from the best orgs, compile that into a newswire, and pipe that directly into their CMS each morning. We've essentially hyperscaled the PR process, so Glassdoor can get their articles on 100s of news outlets every week, without having to do any outreach.
Every week, I get two or three pitches asking me to run paid content or write a blog post but include a link to a product or story about a product without disclosing it was paid advertising. Stacker’s “genius” is not just generating garbage content and packaging it as news, but also charging companies to promote their wares within the garbage content, thus getting paid twice. It’s a great business model for Stacker, I guess, but it results in articles like that MSN post about Oregon beer. I assume TripAdvisor paid for the piece, which is designed so that readers can click through to the site if they like one of the breweries.
It does come with a “story” about craft beer (not, notably, Oregon), but it is exactly the kind of the thing that ChatGPT can pump out in seconds. Indeed, I went to ChatGPT and was able to produce an article very much like the one Stacker offered. I’m not sure how automated the listicle-generating component is, but given that the content comes from the sponsor of the piece, it’s probably pretty seamless. Add the speed of “writing” an AI post, and in minutes you can churn these things out. Which, of course, is exactly what’s happening:
Journalism is in bad shape right now, as media outlets hemorrhage ad money. They fire reporters and take shortcuts to fill their sites, and services like Stacker beckon. They have to drive costs down because ads generate near zero revenue thanks to a whole different suite of enshittified platforms, notably Google. The reason Stacker can boast all the once-great papers as clients because they’re trying to get cheap clicks on their sites. As news readers, the best thing we can do is not click through and be selective in what we read. It’s also helpful to pay for the media you trust. Nevertheless, things are going to get worse before they get better.
If you want to support this site, I have a ko-fi account for ongoing or one-time support. Thanks to the generous support of Guinness and pFriem, the site generates enough money to keep me writing it. I have always wanted this to be a pleasant place to come where all content is free. That said, I love the support readers have offered, and if you feel inspired to chip in, you can do so here.
And as a final comment, since I offer one of the many proliferating sites with news, opinion, and original reporting here, let me take the opportunity to reiterate my standards.
I have two sponsors, Guinness and pFriem. They are breweries I admire and respect, and I always flag our relationship when I mention them in the course of my work here.
I never request beer, but sometimes I receive it, and I tell you where it came from if I mention it here (I rarely do, which is why I don’t receive much).
My site host is Squarespace, and I don’t know if they harvest data or not—but I don’t know who comes here, I don’t track you, and you’ll never receive a solicitation from me.
Oh, and I don’t take money for links nor do I post paid content, nor will I ever.
Transparency is key in this brave new world, and if people aren’t willing to offer it, flee quickly. If you see anything you think is dubious here, call me on it. Your trust is the most important asset I have as a writer, and I’ll do anything to keep it.