alt Hacker NewsBecause of the financial incentives, it would still end up with people doing things to drive traffic to their website though, no? Maybe because the web was smaller, and people looked at it as means "to explore curiosity" in the olden days it kinda worked differently... maybe I just got old, but I don't want to believe that.
By “doing things to drive traffic to their website” do you mean trying to do SEO type things to manipulate search engine rankings? If so, I think that there are probably ways to rank that are immune to tampering.
Don’t worry, you’re not just old. The internet kind of sucks now.