And here’s a thing about me. I want to trust new websites. I have a bias towards clicking on articles from sites I don’t know, because to be quite honest, I’ve read the TCRF page on Phantasy Star a thousand times. How else do you learn something new?

To some extent, I think that this is a solveable problem in terms of just weighting domain age and reputation more highly in search engines (and maybe in LLM training stuff).

The problem is that then you wind up with a situation where it's hard for new media sources to compete with established incumbents, because the incumbents have all that reputation and new entrants have to build theirs, and new entrants get deprioritized by search engines.

I think that maybe there's an argument that you could also provide a couple of user-configurable parameters on search engines to permit not deprioritizing newer sites and the like.

Another issue is that reputation can be bought and sold. This is not new. For example, you can buy a reputatable, established news source and then change its content to be less reputable but promote a message that you want. That will, over time, burn its credibility, but as long as the return you get is worth what you've spent...shrugs