The exact same trends go round and round in web design too (and now apps).
At first things were square (because that was all the technology could do) then in the 2000s CSS exploded and everything went colour gradients and rounded corners, just because people could, then that became old-hat and everything went flat and square again, and then rounded came back (but without so many gradients)
Everything is cyclical.
And the power switch was like KA-JUNK when you pushed it, because it was a big ol’ switch that actually physically connected and disconnected the power.
“It’s now safe to turn off your computer” went away after we moved to software power control, where the operating system could signal the power supply to turn off.
Those meme email chains were annoying at the time, but kinda endearing to look back on in retrospect.
I kept getting added onto ones my mum and dad were getting from a bunch of their friends that had people’s random corporate/work email addresses included and stuff…
It was a simpler time, when boomers hadn’t discovered social media yet, and were making their own fun without Facebook and without the algorithm.
If someone offered me a chance to magic social media away like it never happened, and the price I had to pay was unfunny memes spamming my inbox, it’s a price I’d pay gladly.
Execs aren’t hell-bent on anything apart from making money.
If they could replace every job in the world with AI (except their own) then of course they would, but they can’t because AI cannot do every job.
AI cannot stack supermarket shelves. AI cannot make coffee. AI cannot wait tables.
But AI certainly can produce pictures and text and music - to some questionable degree of “quality” - and so it’s these creative jobs which are being stolen.
And that’s exactly the irony the comic is pointing out. The creative things are what humans actually want to do, but those are the very things we are being replaced in.
They are incentivised because showing accurate results for what you asked for isn’t necessarily the best way to keep people on the platform.
By pushing certain types of videos, such as opinionated content or loud shouty videos for low attention spans, YouTube hopes to keep you engaged for longer than they would by being accurate.
There’s also a direct advertising reason to funnel certain types of video. YouTube creators earn different amounts of money for the same number of views depeding on what category (e.g. financial, gaming, writing advice, cookery etc) YT has auto-categorised your video as. We can infer from this that advertisers are willing to pay more money for ads in some categories than others, and therefore YT is directly incentivised to push those more lucrative categories in search results, even if they aren’t what you wanted.
Plenty of reasons why they want to mess with results.