Matthew Prince

The problem is,

traffic has always been a terrible proxy for value.

Like, if you think about things in life that, you know, you might, that might generate traffic.

Like, take it off the internet for a second.

Think about, like, there's a car accident and people rubberneck to look at the car accident

and it creates a traffic jam, that's not a good thing.

That's not appealing to our sort of better angels.

That's kind of the morbid, sick part of humanity where we sort of stop to look at the car accidents that are happening.

And so traffic has actually always been a somewhat bad proxy for actually the value that's there.

And in fact, a lot of the media space

For a long time, I remember sitting with, you know, a senior, a founder of a very prominent media firm and talking to this person.

And she was bragging about how they generated content, articles, as inexpensively as possible.

And that they would then A-B test headlines to see which ones provoked the most rage.

Because the more rage they could provoke, the more likely you were to click on it and the more likely they were able to serve you an ad.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

That's just a horrible, like that isn't making society better in any possible way.

And so what I think that feeling that a lot of us who've been on the internet for a long time have had is that the traffic-based, attention-based economy that the internet has had

that that actually has kind of led us to both kind of a Disney version, but with kind of rage bait attached to it, right?

So it's sort of like an unfriendly Disney version.