Now think of the 2nd order effects: they paid money to collect that useful information. If it’s no longer feasible to create such high quality content, it won’t magic itself into existence on its own. It’ll all be just crap and slop in a few years.
If the content was really trash it wouldn't have been dropped by Google in a jiffy after a surge of Press mocking Google. That didn't happen. Also Google Search is ad-backed anyways, so your position does not hold.
> If it’s no longer feasible to create such high quality content, it won’t magic itself into existence on its own. It’ll all be just crap and slop in a few years.
Except it kind of does. Almost all high-quality free content on the Internet has been made by hobbyists just for the sake of doing it, or as some kind of expense (marketing budget, government spending). The free content is not supposed to make money. An honest way of making money with content is putting up a paywall. Monetizing free content creates a conflict of interest, as optimizing value to publisher pulls it in opposite direction than optimizing for value to consumer. Can't save both masters, and all. That's why it's effectively a bullet-proof heuristic, that the more monetization you see on some free content, the more wrong and more shit it is.
Put another way, monetizing the audience is the hallmark of slop.
