The gods should have used this little known trick to punish Sisyphus
In classical Greek mythology, Sisyphus was forced to write a newsletter every day only to have to come up with new things to say the next day, repeating this action for eternity.
Two days ago, noahpinion gave us Will data centers crash the economy? and today the Diff asks What would the aftermath of the AI bust look like?
While these are fairly different articles about pretty much the exact same topic (probably inspired by Paul Kedrosky's Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy), when taken with such other articles as AI is Eating the Economy and The AI Spending Boom is Eating the US Economy and The AI Spending Boom Could Have Real Consequences for the US Economy and The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now) and this and this and this -- it makes one wonder why people are wasting so much time saying what has already been said?
If you don't say anything, your audience isn't going to stick around
Everybody is yapping for attention. The need to produce new content for your audience becomes something like audience capture (#278856) or maybe it is one of the engines that powers it. Writers get paid for writing things, so they are incentivized to keep on writing new things so that people will keep on paying them.
But I think the dynamic is a little different than this: people who post things online are trying to get attention. If you aren't posting every day, your audience is going to get used to looking elsewhere. It's not only that you can make more money by posting more things, but you will actually be losing (dying, even?) if you aren't constantly showing up in front of your audience.
But it's really hard to come up with something interesting and new to say every day, and so the simple solution is to talk about what everyone else is talking about.
Also, like making a sequel, there's some amount of certainty to be had that people will be interested in what you have to say if you are saying something about what everyone else is talking about. So we get The End of The World 3 and Final Destination 13 and the Fast and the Furious Geriatric Edition.
Okay, that seems obvious. Probably humans are hardwired to do this, like a flock of birds changing directions at the same time or a pack of dogs barking together. But it's not very interesting.
How could we incentivize talking about different things?
This is where inverse PageRank comes in. Google was amazing because it gave you search results based on what everybody else wanted to see and found useful -- what they linked to. I'd love to see a search engine that gave you results based on what nobody else wanted to see or link to. Probably, though, this would get very boring very quickly, because there is usually a reason some things don't get much attention.