In other words, content is bait, reward is a captured user whose attention - whose sanity, the finite amount of life - can be wasted or plain used against them.
I'm more than happy to see all the websites with attention economy business models to shut down. Yes, that might be 90% of the Internet. That would be the 90% that is poisonous shit.
Perplexity isn't playing in the attention economy unless they upsell you, advertise to you, or put any other kind of bullshit between you and your goal. Attention economy is (as the name suggests) about monetizing attention; it does so through friction.
Fair enough, I agree with that. Hell, we may not need a next Perplexity, this one may very well enshittify couple years down the line - as it happens to almost any service offered commercially on the Internet. I was just saying it isn't happening now - for the moment, Perplexity has arguably much better moral standing than most of the websites they scrape or allow users to one-off browse.
I'm more than happy to see all the websites with attention economy business models to shut down. Yes, that might be 90% of the Internet. That would be the 90% that is poisonous shit.