Comment by miguno

I have been noticing this trend increasingly myself. It's getting more and more difficult to use tools like Google search to find relevant content.

Many of my searches nowadays include suffixes like "site:reddit.com" (or similar havens of, hopefully, still mostly human-generated content) to produce reasonably useful results. There's so much spam pollution by sites like Medium.com that it's disheartening. It feels as if the Internet humanity is already on the retreat into their last comely homes, which are more closed than open to the outside.

On the positive side:

1. Self-managed blogs (like: not on Substack or Medium) by individuals have become a strong indicator for interesting content. If the blog runs on Hugo, Zola, Astro, you-name-it, there's hope.

2. As a result of (1), I have started to use an RSS reader again. Who would have thought!

I am still torn about what to make of Discord. On the one hand, the closed-by-design nature of the thousands of Discord servers, where content is locked in forever without a chance of being indexed by a search engine, has many downsides in my opinion. On the other hand, the servers I do frequent are populated by humans, not content-generating bots camouflaged as users.