Which is exactly why Facebook and Twitter have "blurrified" your content by making it have no verifiable order by default ("top posts" meaning "totally arbitrary order").

This, as you highlight, probably brings in the big bucks. This makes me think Google had something similar in mind when they "personalized" the search results (a wildly unpopular move), going to show that when you are the product, there may be no UX too unpleasant to sink to.

The upside of this is that these incremental UX sacrifices leave the market open for an alternative, either of the same ad-driven kind or, hopefully, of the more sustainable kind.

Hey, a man can dream.