For "substantive" content, this is by far "the best of times" -- such content is very much on the Internet if look for it.
E.g., nearly every interview, debate, or speech of Trump is on YouTube. Good coverage of Trump's positions are on his Web site. So, we have solid primary sources and easy to find good references. I just counted -- I have 187 unique YouTube URLs on Trump.
If you want to know what Trump has said and/or written, primary sources are readily available. In particular, you don't have to take the word of others about what Trump said.
Maybe you will or will not like what Trump has said, but at least now you can know what the heck he actually did say. Sure, this is the first time for such in all of history. So, "best of times".
For more substantive comment, for anyone with such a comment, many blogs and fora are readily available. Finding such things may not always be easy (my startup is intended to help with people finding content on the Internet), but at one time Technorati said that they were tracking 100 million blogs. E.g., as we know here, Sam Altman had some comments, and all of us found them.
For more substantive comment, for anyone with such a comment, many blogs and fora are readily available. Finding such things may not always be easy (my startup is intended to help with people finding content on the Internet)
If there is value in finding such things, there is clearly a degradation of value in their obscuration. Until the general populace can navigate and find their way to the new sources of substantive content, the internet is effectively degraded in this regard.
For your last paragraph, my view is that for ballpark 2/3rds of the content of value on the Internet, searches people would like to do, and results they would like to find there is no good search engine or search means. Part, much of, the challenge is your substantive, that is, how to find (suitably) substantive content. I haven't said my work is for substantive content; the word I have used is content with the meaning the user has in mind, but your substantive is a special case of my meaning. So are entertaining, artistic taste, level of detail, etc.
Sounds like you stand to be an eager user of my startup! Maybe another 3 billion people will also!
Just how to build such a tool is a challenge. I worked out how, but the crucial core internals are some original applied math I derived based on some advanced prerequisites. Some of the prerequisites are astounding -- wouldn't believe that any such things could be true, but they are, and they are astoundingly powerful.
But the user interface is dirt simple -- even a boy of 10 in Thailand who knows no English should be able to learn to use the English language version of the site in five minutes from someone who knows and in 15 minutes on their own. The user experience stands to be fun, something of an addictive adventure.
The code, intended for production, is running and in alpha test.
Ah, YC turned it down!
Demagogic hate-mongering has become the default mode of the political theater that now passes as "public discourse" in our media on both ends of the political spectrum. The new internet media gives strong incentives to that which gains attention, and nothing gains attention like outrage.
What's scary about Trump isn't that people are unwilling to speak out against him. What's scary is that so many people actually want him to win. Trump isn't the problem, Trump is the most visible and frightening symptom of a massive wave of ignorance and insecurity among the American electorate. He's the blood in the stool. Speaking out about how bad the blood is won't really help, you need to go in and kill the cancer that's causing it.
Blood in the stool is quite apt. The cancer is the incentive structure of our media. Let's face it, the current incentive structure of our media today is one in which things like Gawker thrive and anything which is actually substantive suffers a prolonged trickling death. Again, it's the incentives. Outrage politics and the current social media are just the high fructose corn syrup of the mind.