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Fair point. You tore the first sentence of my argument to shreds, thank you for that article! However, "Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships," and I am not talking (neither is OP) about maintaining relationships.

I disagree. Our brains have expectations, evolutionary speaking. They don't care about the size of our communities, I think. Our brains still expect you to climb the dominance hierarchy; it will give you a dopamine boost when you do so, and a shot of cortisol when you degenerate.

I think that mediocrity is a bad thing and that the internet promotes progress. Yes, you have to be better now to be noticed, and yes, chances are that, now, most people give up, but isn't this a kind of social natural selection? If you give up because of, say, HN critics, you should improve.

"There are two things I am sure of after all these years: there is a growing societal need for high assurance software, and market forces are never going to provide it." - Earl Boebert

Ross Anderson has a good reply to your statement in the 7th chapter of his book, 'Security Engineering'. [1]

[1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SEv2-c07.pdf