> This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI. If anything, the shift online covered up a massive hollowing out of the industry. We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage. A lot of stuff that is reported on is coming from a scant number of wire services, or directly from PR teams themselves.

1. By "decline of the open internet and AI" do you mean "decline from the open internet and AI" or "decline of the open internet from AI"?

2. That may be so, but I feel like statements like this, about trends that started before the current thing, have the effect of distracting people from the contemporary causes that are active now.

For instance: a lot of negative social trends currently blamed on modern "screens" and social media had their start long ago, but that doesn't mean smartphones and social media haven't had an extremely negative effect. "Screens" as a problem probably started long ago, with television, but each iteration has become more invasive and more difficult to control, eventually overwhelming many people's ability to choose healthier activities (e.g. there wasn't always something "on" TV that you wanted to watch, which gave you more space to choose to do something else, but that never happens with a smartphone).

I posit things would have likely stabilized at a healthier level without the current technologies, so it's quite right right to blame those technologies for their effects.

Let me rephrase it: "long before the decline of the open internet, and the rise of AI".

I know we point a lot of fingers at social media and/or the dead internet theory - but exactly to your point the process was started simultaneously or a little bit ahead of things like the smartphone, and long before Facebook was a news source.

I think the open Internet is often said to have begun declining with the rise of walled gardens, notably Facebook, 2010 or so. A further factor was Google's degeneration from relatively fair broker to (biased) "question answerer", with a notable step 2019-2020 but with earlier steps also.

Google was using it's version of AI to push "answers to questions" a while before ChatGPT, these just weren't very good so they weren't sorted first.

But it's hard to really say - as long as the Internet has existed, people have been crafting schemes to control/manipulate it and by now those schemes have tremendous weight.

The main thing is the early Internet was a unique because it's success was an accident. Corporations and bureaucrats imagined the "Information Superhighway" as an enriched cable TV and this made it such a failure that amateur use of the Internet wound accidentally "going viral" and only over time did all the crap but it's been a while and the Internet is close to a "super-duper-information superhighway" today.