Google contributes to the bullshit explosion by incentivizing ppl to game the rankings and results. Same with Facebooks newsfeed. And everyone else that relies on Ads to provide their "free" services. Everyone is gaming these services cause there is money to be made if u end up at the top. Including HN. The failed assumption being whatever is in top = quality. These solutions haven't solved the Info Explosion problem. They have made it worse.

Ironically the free services like search ranking/news feed/like counting etc where the initial half thought out response to the info/content explosion that the early internet produced. They just forgot that was their goal and changed the goal post from getting a handle over info explosion to making everything about rewarding attention capture/maximising engagement and other useless shit in that contributes further info pollution.

So when google/fb etc start crumbling, incentives for the spammers and scammer will start dropping too.

This seems to be a naive point of view. Google is a giant piece of shit, but to think they are the only piece of shit is a failure of imagination at the highest order.

The billions google controlls don't disappear if google does. Instead every scammer starts looking for new markets to spread spam in. And this is just marketing, we're not even talking about politics and the firehose of falsehood.

The problem may not be solvable which is concerning as we are at risk of drowning in bullshit.

I not denying that or saying everything is going to change in an instant. I am saying we are past the point, where Google and the Attention Economy they raised, keeps running the way it did in the last 20 years. We are going to see flat revenues, more layoffs, less data centers getting built, less "free services", multiple large countries bringing out legislation on how personal data, algos can be used, more huge fines etc There is even a UN report released this year talking about how the Attention Economy should really work covering issues on the social, political, ethical and cal and economic front. On top of it the Telcos worldwide are all in huge debt. they have been trapped in a cycle building/upgrading the pipes on the belief that all the data flowing is oil. But if its all sewage then how long does the cycle run? Its going to break down.

The attention economy is the old news now... welcome to the intimacy economy brought to you by AI.

And data was the oil... it was saved in lakes and used build the electronic minds we have now created, and those electronic minds are going to work as nuclear reactors that will process the data we now create, and the data they will create as they are embodied and put into the world. It is going to break down, but not in the way we all go back to a disconnected world without surveillance capitalism, no, the future is going to be far worse than you can imagine when it comes to that.

>Telcos worldwide are all in huge debt.

This has nothing really do to with the economics of selling data, this has to do with companies taking out far larger loans than they needed and using it to enrich their shareholders.