Both of your examples (cryptocurrency and paid linking) are indeed plagues on quality content, but I disagree that they’ve replaced quality content. They’re mo

Both of your examples (cryptocurrency and paid linking) are indeed plagues on quality content, but I disagree that they’ve replaced quality content. They’re mostly examples of new business models that people have tried to use to generate new types of content and monetization in a crowded space. Sites like HN and commenters here aren’t trading links for money, we’re just sharing interesting content. The obvious paid advertisements (going from 0 votes to +20 votes in minutes despite obvious content marketing) get flagged away quickly for the most part. Crypto and “web3” especially has become a catch-all for people who want to catch a gold rush or have otherwise run out of ideas for traditional business success. The problem they’re discovering is that the average consumer has almost no interest in crypto unless it’s as a speculative investment to flip to someone else, which means the entire space is basically crypto people flipping things to each other and trying to convince new people to join in so they have more downstream people to flip their tokens too. But despite the constant efforts to flood our news feeds with crypto stories, most of us navigate the internet without cryptocurrencies or NFTs because they’re entirely unnecessary and you have to go out of your way to do anything with them. Since they bring no actual benefit, we just ignore it. And it’s fine.