Paywalled. How ironic.

No. Infinite free accounts based on email addresses with no rate limiting are ruining “the web”. Rather, what most people think of, “the web” (i.e. Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, Whatsapp, and a few other big sites) is what’s getting “ruined”.

Think of it like a game that suddenly becomes free to play after years of being a normal, pay-for-it game. It almost always ruins the game! AI slop has become so cheap it’s basically a free, new bullshit generator that can be very convincing.

When there’s no cost or consequences to bad behavior, bad actors will take advantage of that. The same is true for the web in general.

The solution? Stop using sites that allow (or index) bullshit! Use sites that have proper community moderation. Sites that don’t rely on the good will of a giant corporation.

Instead of searching for that thing in Google, maybe try searching Wikipedia directly (it does have a decent search engine). Use trustworthy sites and tools that curate content (like Lemmy).

I hate to admit it but we might need to go back to the Yahoo model of search engines except instead of Yahoo we have communities building the index.