I personally held the (probably mistaken) belief that by democratizing publishing information, it would be harder to create a false signal. Ie, if everyone has

I personally held the (probably mistaken) belief that by democratizing publishing information, it would be harder to create a false signal. Ie, if everyone has a printing press, then nobody can control the entire narrative, the way a handful of newspaper barons could. Instead, it seems to me now that giving everyone a printing press made so much noise that we still rely on centralized authorities to sort, rate and surface those that we want to read. And it made it cheaper, in terms of both reputation cost and money, for someone to create a bunch of false signal. The parallel to the printing was misleading, and the true outcome is much more complicated and mixed. The scale really changes how these things work, in terms of the incentives created and the sheer amount of content possible to consume.