>Do we need a (curated?) unadulterated stockpile of human content to avoid the enshittification of everything?

Either that, or a human level AI.

Well no, we need billions of human-level AIs who are experiencing a world as rich and various as the world that the billions of humans inhabit.

Once we've got the first, making a billion is easy.

That said… are content creators collectively (all media, film and books as well as web) a thin tail or a fat tail?

I could easily believe most of the actual culture comes from 10k-100k people today, even if there's, IDK, ten million YouTubers or something (I have a YouTube channel, something like 14 k views over 14 years, this isn't "culturally relevant" scale, and even if it had been most of those views are for algorithmically generated music from 2010 that's a literal Markov chain).

Maybe we could print out knowledge on dead trees and store them somewhere, perhaps make it publically available? (stolen joke, not mine).

Yahoo.com will rise from the ashes.

I mean, you’re not wrong. I’ve been building some unrelated web search tech and have considered just indexing all the sites I can about and making my own “non shit” search engine. Which really isn’t too hard if you want to do say, 10-50 sites. You can fit that on one 4TB nvme drive on a local workstation.

I’m trying to work on monetization for my product now. The “personal Google” idea is really just an accidental byproduct of solving a much harder task. Not sure if people would pay for that alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_background_steel but for web content.