The problem of web content is the search and recommendation systems have no opinion on skill, effort, scholarship or accuracy. I'm OK with the rest of what you

The problem of web content is the search and recommendation systems have no opinion on skill, effort, scholarship or accuracy. I'm OK with the rest of what you say, but the portion about "effort" seems to be echoing Marx's labor theory of value. This has been debunked any number of ways. But I think for the population here, used to building things as efficiently as we can, it's perverse to try to reward someone for working harder, i.e., doing things the slow and inefficient way. Given a product equal in the other measures - skill, scholarship, accuracy, and probably some other variables as well, we should probably prefer the one that took less effort to achieve that bar.