SEO and content that wastes your time

Have you ever looked for instruction for doing a simple task, such as changing the time on your smartwatch, and you end up wading through minutes of introductions and backgrounds that are seemingly relevant but are actually useless?

We may have SEO to thank for that: an article that solves your problem in under 50 words probably won't rank as well as one that is 500 words (with useless facts that you don't already know about or don't need to know about).

Some people have also figured out that it's totally fine to include solutions from their competitors as well: just put an obscure, difficult solution as the first one in the article, your own product as the second, followed by a bunch of solutions from your competitors that don't make them sound nearly as easy as the second one.

I wonder if that's what happens when those who are in charge get to select metrics that allows them to extract as much as possible from the system.