It seems to have happened with search engines already. At one time, a one-person show writing interesting content got some quid-pro-quo traffic from Google. G

It seems to have happened with search engines already. At one time, a one-person show writing interesting content got some quid-pro-quo traffic from Google. Google increasingly pushes organic results down in favor of ads. Then, "rich snippets" publish your content on their site. Or as they did with Wikipedia, just bulk copying lots of content into their pages. The one-person-show used to make enough money from that referral traffic to pay for hosting and perhaps a small bit more...but that stops. So now they are less incented to bother with it at all. Ultimately then, less quality content for Google to scrape. It does feel like eventually, the incentive to publish things publicly goes way down.