I was going to say, the acceptance of bottom-of-the-barrel and subsequent capital investment in SEO as some industry-standard practice has pretty much lowered our standards for writing and comprehensibility across the board

it probably doesn't help that the US education system is so deeply broken with how rooted it is in segregation-era practices [0][1][2]. the average gets dragged down quite a bit when some districts receive so much money that they're flying their Spell Bowl teams to nationals and putting them up in hotels while another one a few miles away can't afford to pay for textbooks. average reading levels suffer and consequently so too does the effort that people put into writing well and reading critically

[0] https://www.shankerinstitute.org/segfunding

[1] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/research-areas/working-papers/s...

[2] https://edlawcenter.org/research/the-color-of-opportunity/