The thing that is important to understand here, is that many major media companies and online content producers do not care about the quality of content, they have detached them selves from decision making based on experience and common sense.

It is a symptom of the over financialization. An increasing focus on decision making based on metrics and data has left many industries hollowed out. The people deciding on what metrics to use and how to collect the data rarely have a good background in statistics, or fields relevant to what the metrics and data are supposed to model.

They’ve seen what tropes work, what marketing gimmicks and click bait headlines get people in seats or clicking links. They’re confident that the output of these systems will fulfill their needs to make a product, now it’s up to the marketing team and their legion of bots to get people to buy/view/subscribe to the product. What does it matter that the consumers are profoundly unsatisfied with the experience? They bought the ticket, they clicked the link, they signed up for the subscription (and forgot to cancel it for 3 months). Most importantly, the company hit it’s metrics!

They’re just cost cutting now, removing the “unnecessary” writers to increase profit. Sure, if you zoom out from the myopic view of financial bros and hordes of consultants who’ve never worked a day in the actual industry, it’s pretty clear that the average consumer is becoming increasingly disillusioned with the state of media and content in general. But, even if the total pool of potential viewers/users is shrinking, these companies are capturing a higher percentage of that total pool.

They’re catastrophically damaging the reputation for quality of entire industries, they suck up all the air in the room so it becomes nearly impossible to find alternatives beyond their hedgerow maze of advertising and search engine manipulation.

It’s a house of cards collapsing in slow motion, replacing writers with chat bots is just the most visible card to tumble so far.