Kind of a hypocritical rant

[BigRedRedneck]

We no longer live in a society where the substance of an article holds any weight. Fluff pieces thrown over social media, with no citation, no proof. You can browse the comment section of any video, or article and see my point. People start arguments over opinions. It often diminishes to name calling. People perpetuate things they hear and don't even realize, mostly due to a lack of research, that they are spreading complete and total bullshit. Which in turn creates this giant snowball of bullshit that constantly increases in size. The problem? Nobody even notices they are doing it. There are people from different point of views arguing both sides of every agenda, and they are both wrong. Every side of everything holds people so puffed up on their personal feeling they don't think they need to know the truth. You click on an article and have to scroll through ads, hit the little 'x' on multiple pop-ups, just to read something that means nothing. We all do it too. We all get drawn in by a nice shiny sensationalized headline, just to see someone with no knowledge of something give their spin on it without merit. We keep feeding these ad based revenue sites. Many of us, myself included, lurk on comment sections like it is reality TV. You scroll, and scroll and don't gain anything.
Trying to research something is becoming even harder. You try to find facts backing up your point, and only find one-dimensional pages that are strictly ads. The saddest part is Wikipedia is one of the few sites that is even trying to educate anymore. It has been, as long as i can recall, a site not worthy of citation. Now it is one of the only sites that has more words than ads. It's becoming an increasingly more difficult place to be educated. We as a society don't seem to want to learn anymore. We want to see a misleading headline, and read a few comments. Then we want to say things from a point of authority, "I saw an article the other day...". Fill that ellipses with any headline you want and people listen. They believe. Unless they know otherwise, they won't refute your "knowledge". It disappoints me. As a man who has always loved to learn, and investigate things below surface level, I find it increasingly difficult to do so within the parameters of media today. Maybe something will change. Maybe people will finally get fed up with having to click through 15 slides of ads to look at 12 pictures. Maybe we'll get fed up with the lack of citation, the lack of proof. From where I am standing though, it doesn't look great. It's getting worse by the day it seems. When I have to scroll through multiple pages on google to get an answer that isn't "quick" or "convenient" and has some actual evidence backing it, I feel we are meeting the demise
of an educated society as we know it.