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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> We're on the cusp of a profound content shovelware crisis.

No, we've been inundated with low-quality content for decades now. This is nothing new.

Fortunately, ratings and reviews and popularity have always been an extremely effective antidote.

Even if 99% of stuff on a platform is total crap, nobody cares. It's a non-issue. Whether you're talking about music, books, TV shows, or whatever. The 1% rises to the top and you don't honestly need to pay attention to the rest.

If you choose to pay $20 for something that has 3 reviews that are all 1-star, then that's more your problem than the system's problem.

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>No, we've been inundated with low-quality content for decades now. This is nothing new.

Trends matter too. If it gets to be an order of magnitude cheaper to shill your products on social media and forums, set up seo crap articles to phish users from search results, or churn out good old fashioned email scams, then expect an order of magnitude worse signal to noise ratio on the internet as a result. There could be a point reached where the internet is functionally broken, with the signal to noise ratio too low to make it useful for anything, save for navigating directly to known good hosts that themselves will become increasingly more lucrative targets for enshittification.

Yeah that happened 10 years ago

> No, we've been inundated with low-quality content for decades now. This is nothing new.

The problem with this argument is that scale matters.

When a small number of people were trading mp3 files on FTP servers it was not seen as a problem. When Napster came out, it was seen as a problem. It was correctly seen as a qualitative shift in the effect it would have on society.

I have to agree reviews work very well. But it distresses me that, knowing the absolute tsunami of garbage that awaits us without it, we are SO laissez faire when it comes to protecting that system. We allow companies to game reviews with kick backs, we lets spammers in posting fake reviews. This is currently our one wall of defense and cracks in it should terrify us.

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