The death of intermediaries
I've been musing lately about the way the internet feels different with AI eating the world. I think my opening an account here is, at least partially, a reaction to that change in feeling that I have been experiencing. I think the problem is that it used to be impossible to produce a large volume of content without expending a similarly large volume of time, effort, and, to some extent, money. AI changes this fundamentally.
Now, we are awash in content and mostly content with very little actual thought behind it. Content for content's sake. Since the most vacuous content requires the least effort to fake, the race to the bottom accelerates. It feels impossible to find a foothold and tell what is worth reading. There used to be, for lack of a better term, markers of quality. Today all those markers can be simulated cheaply and easily.
Thus, the return to a simpler smaller internet. Internet of real people. A rigorous rejection of the algorithmic intermediary and a demand for sincerity. I hope that places like this continue to grow. In the same vein, I have switched all of my content consumption to an RSS feed delivered via email. No filtering that I don't explicitly create. No ordering other than publish date. I find I can actually think sometimes.