Huh? I didn't say anything about monetary profit. Users don't profit monetarily when they read buzzfeed articles so I have no idea how you would have got that idea.

Rather than knee-jerk dismiss the suggested interpretation, why don't you simply tell us how you define value?

Something that people want.

Thanks. That may be your definition, but it's not, oh, say, the neoclassical definition of economic value, it's not even the Austrian / Libertarian definition of value, it's not the classical economic definition of use value from Adam Smith, and it's not even the classical definition of value that you'll find through Greek and Roman philosophy.

Or, say, of concepts of value from ecology and systems theory.

But if you want to have conversations based on your Glory, by all means do.

I sincerely appreciate your letting us know that's your intent so as to avoid considerable wasting of time.

If that's your entire definition of value, it's overly narrow. Lots of people want things that are directly bad for them. Letting a five-year-old eat candy until his teeth fall out is not providing him a valuable service.

To get back to the original subject, reasonable people can perhaps debate whether the explosion in clickbait articles is "good" or "bad" in whatever sense, but it doesn't follow from that that "value" lies solely in satisfying people's most immediate wants.

Yet another case of the HN hive-mind downvoting inconvenient truths.