Also, my ad was for Vegas. You just happened to get served a worse than usual advertisement.

Like yeah, GameStop clearly fits into the death of retail, and acquiring eBay does increase their market visibility or presence. Beyond that, what ebay/GS could’ve gained is way different and arguably more substantial than what acquiring Sears did for either company involved. Atleast here, one operates storefronts for second hand transactions and the other expressly doesn’t. There is definitely money in that.

I just don’t get arguing that it’s the same experience as what people actually consider fine.

A more vague answer I can think of is that it’s preferential and doesn’t matter to most — with designers just being highly particular about preferences, in a way that isn’t really open to objective choice. One font may display slightly better but the other font pairs better with the title font. Or we’ll look for specific issues that I don’t really see in either fonts.

It’s not quite slave labor but it probably should be compensated better at the minimum.

However, I’d argue that there are some good arguments for this sort of optimization with what we know about potential consumer insights and how insignificant (but unique) aspects of an appeal can make or break someone’s interest. Or just given other evidence of how unique appeals can be effective (see things like Project Narwhal from Obamas first campaign.)

It’s also more tangential than argument above, but what we know about regular users of larger platforms indicates that a one size fits all approach doesn’t really fit all. Also consider that we really do have the tools/data now more than ever to offer a unique experience to users, and how that very concept of a unique user experience is what led to the proliferation of the platforms we use in the first place. There is a reason we preferred Google to Yellow pages and Google ad revenue took off — or atleast it wasn’t just about the profit motive of easy to access, updatable information. It was about using your insights and insights from others to craft unique results that appealed to you in a way that mass produced impersonal solutions did not do.

Maybe a tagging solution is the way? if you determine a set amount of popular keywords for a topic and filter around those, you can offer more relevant results. With some sort of public tagging system you can also have SEO friendly pages around tags and get people browsing stuff they wouldn't normally search for.