Filing this under "seen on Hacker News today"
Clearly we didn't think this through back then.
It should have been obvious to us that it is easier to create noise than it is to create signal.
The idyllic dream of a free internet with long tails would be replaced with a steadily worsening signal to noise ratio.
We cheered on when Google supplanted Yahoo! because the computers were better at curating than humans.
Man, we clearly sucked at choosing the right path. Dreams of utopia always hit hard when they fall.
(original link here)