Comment by shadowgovt

Every time I see people talk about 'dead internet' I think about what web sites looked like before Google dropped PageRank into the whole ecosystem and utterly killed the utility of putting huge blobs of black-on-black text at the bottom of a page for keyword-match purposes. This was then shortly followed by Google becoming so popular they could use user behavior itself as a signal for site quality (much to the chagrin of every new publisher ever who suddenly had a catch-22 of "Nobody visits my site because Google won't uprank it because nobody visits my site").

The Internet has never been dead. Or alive. Ever since it escaped its comfortable cage in the university / military / small-clique-of-corporations ecosystem and became a thing "anyone" can see and publish on, there has forever been a push-pull between "People wanting to use this to solve their problems" and "People wanting eyeballs on their content, no matter the reason." We're just in an interesting local minimum where the ability to auto-generate human-shaped content has momentarily overtaken the tools search engines (and people with their own brains) use to filter useful from useless, and nobody has yet come up with the PageRank-equivalent nuclear weapon to swing the equation back again.

I'm giving it time, and until it happens I'm using a smaller list of curated sites I mostly trust to get me answers or engage with people I know IRL (as well as Mastodon, which mostly escapes these effects by being bad at transiting novelty from server to server), because thanks to the domain name ownership model pedigree of site ownership still mostly matters.