This is the video that finally launched Kate Cassidy past 10K subscribers, and I had a feeling that this was coming. She’s been on a roll with some killer video topics, and this is the one that finally struck a nerve! I’m also so excited about what she’s planning for a new community for Curious Minds, and I’ll be sure to share something about that.

So, is the Internet dying? Please, go watch her video, and share your own thoughts in the comments! 😊 Also, check out her website: katecassidy.online

Here’s my take, somewhat edited from my own comment:

I ENTIRELY agree that the Internet is going to change in some very dramatic ways over the next decade. The question is, which way does it go? The whole shift of content moving into premium ‘walled gardens’ is especially telling. As a former SEO specialist, I entirely agree that the way the internet was and how we interacted with it is all but gone. As it currently is constituted, the internet is not only dying a slow, painful death, but the link rot is out of control. So many resources that existed even five years ago are either now paywalled, purchased by some conglomerate and shoved in some digital IP warehouse somewhere and gatekept, or worse, simply vanished. Without the internet archive, I can’t imagine how much human knowledge may have ALREADY been lost! And what good stuff is left is stuck on one of a few major platforms like reddit – which I personally find posting at to be just asking to get spammed by trolls.

To be fair, though, the AI slop is actually quite similar to, and not that much worse actually, what I ran into when I finally gave up on content marketing back in the late 2010’s. Content mills pretty much made it impossible for me to charge any reasonable rate for article writing. These days, you need an in where you know people that will charge you a fee for super-niche highly curated content writing. I will also say that a lot of the AI written stuff, even unedited, is still somehow better than a lot of the content slop I used to sift through even ten years ago. But the problem is, it’s already recycling itself and everything reads like the same toaster oven wrote it.

What we need is a reset button for the major search engines: Google and Bing, especially. Go back to serving search queries first and advertisers second and let PEOPLE do the work of serving the content people are ACTUALLY looking for… of course, that’s not going to happen without a major paradigm shift, the death of social media algorithms, and far superior education in media literacy, tech literacy, and good old basic reading and writing skills! Soon, the bots really WILL run the internet while the rest of us go all Henry David Thoreau and build cabins in the woods like in Walden! 😉

~ Amelia Desertsong