[willhinsa]

If a search engine cannot recognize what content is good and which is bad, it's not a good search engine.

If there was a sea of garbage with some beautiful healthy fish still in it, it doesn't mean I'm going to start catching garbage and passing it off as halibut.

But the model of constant growth required and advertising to cross purposes of your users means that they're selling garbage by the pound and calling it fish!

I have no interest in agreeing that the emperor's new clothes exist.

[janalsncm]

There are two possibilities:

1. Search engines are getting less good at ranking bad content below good content

2. The good content is getting worse. So bad, in fact, that it looks like bad content.

It may be a little of both. I lean towards 2, though. It’s kind of a race to the bottom in terms of jamming your page with ads, buzz words, and popups these days.

Generally speaking, the web doesn’t have great results for e.g. product recommendations. Part of it is because of how centralized the internet has become.

The best you can do a lot of the time is to just serve mostly Reddit results. But even that can be gamed.

[willhinsa]

the PROPORTION of content is getting worse

but GREAT content on an absolute numbers level is rising every single year

excepting the death of good content through attrition and entropy good content only goes up unless we're all dead

it's just discovering good new content is difficult, especially when you're a sclerotic barnacle tied to legacy interests of all stripes!