But good stuff came out of that crud. Now people do their writing on Facebook and Reddit. Those have much lower or no placement in Google.
I find google results impoverished compared to 6-10 years ago. You used to get commentary from people, and it wasn't half bad. Now most searches return commercial results.
I often give up and go search relevant subreddits for many types of queries.
99% of Reddit and Facebook are crap too. Anything produced by humanity in general will be. But good stuff gets produced too.
Somewhere, somehow, a switch was flipped and "discourse?" became "discounts!".
But in niches where there's no reason for experts or ordinary people to create text on standalone sites, the results are junk. I remember this being different.
Now to find good stuff I have to search Hacker News, Reddit, etc.
So if you have 1,000,000 blogs, and 99.9% are shit, you still have 1,000 good blogs! If only 0.01% of blogs were good, you'd still have 100 great blogs- which is excellent for the public good.
The same long tail effects appear on things like Wikipedia, too. Wikipedia on average might have say 10-20% reliability, because 80-90% of the pages are crap. But that's because most of those pages are really obscure. The 10% that are most observed- say, pages about chemistry and physics- are updated very regularly, even quicker that science textbooks.
It seems that people are really bad at thinking about this clearly, probably because we imagine quality is a yes-or-no proposition.
For you to make this claim, you are also claiming that the parent post is blaming "all of society's problems" of yester-year (pre-Facebook) on AOL. That's a rather obtuse reading, bordering on deliberate.
I'm curious to hear your opinions on the quality of Wikipedia, and its success and/or failure! Is it doing well, or poorly? Do you prefer say, Encyclopedia Britannica? Genuinely curious.