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This was one of the major things that to my knowledge, as an insider, early internet powerusers in all the enthusiasm about and advocacy of free flow of information kind of didn't see coming. Not so much the enshittification cycle, but the realization that digital content is so much easier and cheaper to produce than analog content, even before LLMs entered the scene, that the quality of actual content must go down
Tooooottally. And the irony that we demolished the gatekeepers only to be drowning in good content among lots of slop/entshittification that we now desperately need the gatekeepers back. (=Curation)
let's go through them
This was one of the major things that to my knowledge, as an insider, early internet powerusers in all the enthusiasm about and advocacy of free flow of information kind of didn't see coming. Not so much the enshittification cycle, but the realization that digital content is so much easier and cheaper to produce than analog content, even before LLMs entered the scene, that the quality of actual content must go down. And I think that there may be not only correlation but a causal relationship between the marginal cost of content, and the median quality of all content. And the question is now: will we be happier when we're consuming low quality content? I haven't ever seen a study saying that doomscrolling is beneficial (besides a tiny hint you yourself gave) but that is, to me, the culmination of low quality content consumption (and also: podcasts, streaming services, opinion pieces in news papers, and most the online discussion, probably including my own comments, probably including this comment.)
But that also means that I still enjoy well produced content, and that the only thing the marginal cost of producing content does for me is there being so much noise (also on SN) that I need to spend significantly more time on the filters. Even today, a time when I have removed myself from nearly all social media and fora, I spend more time on filter tuning and curation processes than I have ever done before, as in 10x more time.
I think that this is what hooks in to your observation that
I am not seeing it either because I just shut the slop out.
I think this is disputable, especially in the LLM era. I know some people, including a bunch of stackers, that are proven capable of using LLMs for input or at most intermediate-product only, and that is, from my deeply biased pov, a great use-case. But overall, I don't see that at all! Instead I see across the board an increased reliance on LLMs to create end products from lazy natural language descriptors. And in that case, you don't really obtain any knowledge, because all you really do is publish the results of an automation pipeline (and as someone that once upon a time was literally specialized in automation pipelines, it is my professional opinion that these pipelines suck, especially the lazy "agentic" ones.)
So while the LLM could better enable the acquisition of knowledge than a search engine or an encyclopedia would because it can enrich these sources and is not bound to the limits of those, it heavily depends on the wish of the user to be empowered and accumulate knowledge versus just yoloing a bot here and there and reaping the meager rewards slop will bring to you. Looking at how many people I know that claim they cannot read, especially in NA, but it is growing in EU too, there isn't much of a mindset for taking in knowledge in the first place?
Because truth is contextual, and context is social? LLMs are anti-social. The best they can do is fake it and then you recognize it from a lightyear away.
I think I addressed this in my previous comment. This is the one thing LLMs are said to be good at but I have honestly not seen it. I've tried the most hyped solutions coming from the AI bros for bot decision making and orchestration, and it is all completely retarded. Even today, if I am not precise enough in my question to a bot I get all sorts of recommendations towards execution from some silicon bullshitter that literally has zero experience. I guess Claude has been trained on real life Deloitte consultancy chats. What a bunch of rubbish.
So here's what I think: if your bar is ultra low, then yes you can have content automatically created based on superior "knowledge" and automatically published. Which works great if your audience is a bunch of doomscrolling zombies with no future other than the lowest rank on the UBI ladder and mandated sterilization.
For me, I prefer your posts, and I prefer @denlillaapan's articles over the usual slop we can find on the mainstream media. I like reading things from people that are passionate about peculiar things. Especially on SN. I also prefer not to need UBI.
This is the most important thing, I think. For us to retain self respect and the drive to produce and share interesting things, we must have things where we're superior from the robots. But my question remains: will enough people recognize that they need this before they lost all competitive advantage?