Well I wouldn't say "invented", but I'd agree with "incentivized at scale until it became a cancer on the web"

The weird thing is that YouTube seems to have incentivized a lot of good content. Sure there is "scalable slop" like Mr. Beast, but there is also good content on YouTube (Fall of Civilizations podcast, etc.).

Somehow on the web I am not seeing a lot of good content incentivized by ads. I see a lot of WikiHow-type stuff.

It seems like writing moved to Substack and so forth.