While the author describes them as nice and sympathetic, literally every action described and every quote makes them seem like insufferable douchebags. Maybe the author…
The authors angle seems to be more of “hate the game not the players”, and even the they aren’t entirely sympathetic to all of them. The more that search engines became the main entrance to the web, the more that website owners would seek to get closer to the entrance, and the SEO people illustrated in the article are the result.
The very fact of doing things like this was in the 00s something which would make your life dangerous. People really good at generating spam would sometimes get their legs broken, or walk out of their window by mysterious causes.
But then non-flat search engines and social media came into existence, empowering these fucks so radically that killing them IRL stopped being a solution, 10 heads would pop up for each one you hew down.
Is this typical? I don’t often read the Verge unless someone links it, but even the first paragraph already made me cringe a bit when they talked about “deciding to buy a plane ticket” or whatever idk the exact words, I’m not going to read that again lol
I clicked on this article and was elated not to see autoplaying videos, cookie stuff, pop ups, ads, anything. I dunno if my PiHole had something to do her that but damn, that’s a clean article tho (yeah I still didn’t read it, I’m not at the “thinking” stage of the day yet)
Love your name and the music that immediately played in my head also
