If a correction comes, it won’t be technological but cultural. Communities that behave like communities survive.

Everything else is just a landing page with a chatbox attached.

When attention is the metric, people signal expertise without ever exposing what they actually know.
High noise, low truth.

Yet some communities resist.
They’re boring in the best possible way: low-ego, high-signal, built on reciprocity and shared problems — not disguised salesmanship.

This isn’t what the internet was built for. The early web was transparency, curiosity, knowledge as a public good.

Now everything is a funnel. Every question becomes an angle. Every answer a lead.
It’s hustle-culture logic + platforms that reward visibility over contribution.

I joined subreddits, Discords, LinkedIn groups, Telegram, X circles.
Most are silent.

The active ones are split in two:
• people complaining
• people replying “DM me, I have the solution”

Consultancy cosplay at industrial scale.

AI didn’t kill merit — it killed performative merit.
The winners will be those who treat AI as leverage to build more, not as a crutch to do less.
Initiative is the new curriculum.

One theme keeps coming up: the only reliable entry-level signal left is “show us something real you built.”
Portfolios, prototypes, repos, shipped work — the last things AI can’t mass-produce.

Outputs converge → signals disappear.

And while LLMs now include “learning modes” that teach instead of cheat, almost nobody uses them.
The shortcut becomes the standard, widening the gap between output quality and real capability.

The contradiction is sharp:
AI made learning easier and hiring harder.
The old path — good grades, strong CV, first job — no longer maps to reality.

What’s collapsing is the signal.
Essays, assignments, exams used to serve as imperfect proxies for competence.

Now everyone’s work looks the same.

Yes of course, it is. You don’t necessarily have the same tone everywhere. Sometimes it’s better to have different tones, each one adapted to their specific channel, indeed.