RIP magazines. Sad to think that they will be replaced with half-assed Wikihow articles or one-size-fits-all OpenAI-hallucinated slop.
If a magazine article is too shallow, or above your head, or below your level, then you're stuck. But with the internet and basic searching skills, you can find any level of content, in writing, in video, with projects and how-to's, detailed explanations, teardowns, DIYs stuf, fundamental technical specs and protocols, and on and on.
I routinely find the stuff I want on the first page of search, solid, deep content. Do people simply not know how to search?
Most any topic has a wikipedia article on page 1, which is always a good gateway to learn an intro to something, and usually has links to much deeper content.
Some tests: "chess" returns all pretty good content. "electronic music" - all good stuff, from wikipedia, to subreddits on EDM and related, to encyc britannica, and one news story. "how to cook salmon" - again all really good stuff: first few are simple and correct recipes, then a few videos, some reddit topics. Not a single crappy link. "who is quincy jones" - wikipedia hit top, news that he died today (quite a good set of links, no crackpot sites), his website, his instagram, National Endowment of the Arts link, encyclopedia britannica link. "does quantum entanglement violate local realism?" All good. Even pop stuff like "does taylor swift or the beatles have more grammys" has all good, solid hits: wikipedia, grammy.com, reddit post, quora, forbes, NYT,BBC, popvortex with a list of all grammys. Every link answered the question, is not wikihow, and is not AI generated.
Yep, as I expected. My guess is you didn't actually try and just made a claim without evidence.
Give me some topics for which the "the vast majority of content and most certainly the most common content the major search engines serve up" is "half-assed Wikihow articles or one-size-fits-all OpenAI-hallucinated slop."
I found zero out of dozens of links on some widespread topic checks.
Good luck.
(The internet opened up the world for all of us living in the boonies- Amsterdam was a 2 hour train ride away. I barely knew Japan existed until I could pirate Gundam and Naruto from Kazaa).
Then they let Google scrape everything for SEO.
They never should have followed online content, they should have led.
if we didn't have the rat race everyone could just contribute the best knowledge and content and free software to the world. but instead of fixing the rat race we focus on literally everything else to conform to it.