This is something that has recently made me pessimistic about the modern internet: not only has the organic blogging community of the early millennium dwindled,

This is something that has recently made me pessimistic about the modern internet: not only has the organic blogging community of the early millennium dwindled, but what blogs exist now are often created as intentional copies of other blogs so they draw advertising revenue. You often see jobs posted on sites like Upwork where the client wants to hire someone to examine a preexisting blog and then re-write its content in order to escape copyright law. Recipe blogs are probably the most egregious example of this content theft (the blog owner who claims to be “born and bred in Louisiana and passionate about Cajun food” makes grammatical mistakes suggesting an Eastern European or Southeast Asia origin), but it is now spreading to all kinds of other hobbies and interests. If you are an original writer about a subject with no advertising on your site, it sucks to see you and your peers’ content buried in search results among the copycat websites. And now the same commercial pressures to simply copy someone else’s reportage are now commonly seen in news businesses that were hitherto thought to be respectable. Is it inevitable on the modern web that all original content will end up copied by others?