I keep noticing that most of what I read online is worse than it used to be. There’s more of everything than ever, but it’s thinner: more articles that say nothing, more confident voices with no expertise behind them, more pages that exist to rank rather than to be read. I wanted to work out why, because I don’t think it comes down to one thing.
Anyone can publish now, and that changed the filters
For most of the last century, getting something published was expensive and slow. A publisher, an editor, a fact-checker, and a typesetter all stood between a writer and an audience. Those people were a bottleneck, and they were also a filter. Plenty of good work never made it through, but most of what did had been checked by someone whose job was to check it.
Desktop publishing, then the web, then print-on-demand, then blogs and social platforms tore that bottleneck out. That’s mostly good. Voices that never would have been heard now have an audience, and I’d rather live in this world than the gatekept one. But the filter went away with the gate. When the cost of publishing drops to roughly zero, the incentive shifts from getting one thing right to getting many things out. Volume wins, and the average quality of any given page drops even as the total amount of good writing goes up. The hard part is no longer producing content. It’s finding the good stuff in the pile.
Speed killed the second-pass
Newsrooms used to verify, then publish. Online, the order often flips: publish what you have, correct it later if you have to. Being first beats being right because the traffic arrives in the first hour. Meanwhile the budgets that paid for editors and fact-checkers shrank with print revenue, so the people who would catch the errors aren’t there anymore. You end up with faster, cheaper, less-checked work, and readers who’ve learned not to fully trust any of it.
The incentives reward the wrong things
Two things drive this, and one of them is search. Once Google decides what gets seen, people write for Google. That produced the content farm: sites paying writers a few dollars an article to churn out pages built to rank, stuffed with keywords, padded to look thorough, and accurate only by accident. Google fights back with algorithm updates, the farms adapt, and the cycle continues as long as ranking equals revenue.
The other is attention. Social platforms make money when you stay, so their algorithms favor whatever keeps you scrolling, which is usually the emotional, the extreme, and the outrage-baiting over the careful and the dull-but-true. Creators feel that pressure and respond to it. The reward isn’t for being right, it’s for being engaging, and those two things only sometimes overlap.
Generative AI poured fuel on both fires. A content farm that managed a million articles a month with human writers can now produce far more with almost none. The marginal cost of a plausible-looking article is approaching zero, which is exactly the wrong direction for quality.
Expertise got harder to spot
When anyone can publish, the signals we used to read credibility from stop working. A verification badge or a confident tone tells you nothing about whether someone actually knows the subject. A person who genuinely understands running shoes can be completely wrong about credit cards, and online both opinions look identical. Most of us don’t have the time or the training to check, so we fall back on shortcuts, and the shortcuts are easy to fake. That’s how misinformation spreads about vaccines, nutrition, climate, and the rest: not because people are stupid, but because telling a real expert from a convincing one has gotten genuinely hard.
So what do you do about it
I don’t think there’s a clean fix, because the causes feed each other. Cheap publishing creates volume, volume creates competition for attention, attention rewards engagement over substance, and that rewards the farms and the fakers, which erodes trust, which sends people toward sources that just confirm what they already think.
What I can control is narrower. As someone who writes, I’d rather publish less and mean it, cite what I actually read, and not pad a 600-word point into 3,000 words to look comprehensive. As someone who reads, I try to notice when a page is engineered to rank or to provoke rather than to inform, and I put more weight on people whose specific track record I can check than on whoever the feed served me. None of that scales to fix the whole problem. But it’s the part that’s mine to fix.