The Internet Keeps Getting Worse. Here's Why That’s Good News for You.
The surprising reward inside AI saturation
It’s harder than ever to get noticed online.
We look at everyone else and immediately feel outmatched.
Everyone else is publishing faster.
They’re all scaling harder.
People are playing a bigger game and you feel left behind.
It feels like you’ve showed up late to a party that’s already full.
So, you publish relentlessly…only to become a drop in the ocean. Do you need to find a way to scale your operation up to match, or are you just cooked?
Nope.
The answer isn’t more scale; it’s something else entirely.
And hidden in it is an opportunity, if you want to see it the right way.
The mistake we make about “more competition”
It’s depressingly easy to look at crowded fields like social media or content marketing and think:
It’s too late to start.
I’d need to scale like crazy to compete.
I’ve fallen into this trap loads of times. But each time I do, I miss the more important questions it’s worth asking, like:
How are people choosing what to consume?
Is any of this sea of content even worth reading?
The temptation is to think more noise means more competition, but what’s actually happening is simpler. Most content being put out there wasn’t exactly “elite” to begin with. But the age of AI has made producing content incredibly easy. Suddenly, people didn’t have to try to produce passable writing.
And as good a writing assistant as AI is, it never turned a greenhorn into an expert writer overnight. It just removed friction, which massively lowered the barrier to entry—but the barrier to excellence stayed exactly where it has been since forever.
It shouldn’t be the first time we’ve noticed this trend, either.
Lowering friction changes how we think about effort
I was listening to a podcast the other day which mentioned how much tougher it is to find romantic partners in 2026. There’s more flakiness, more ghosting, and the entire thing feels more transactional than ever.
It got me thinking. I’ve never liked dating apps myself. On the one hand, they created a much easier way to meet people. On the other, they also made a lot of efforts entirely optional.
Suddenly, meeting people no longer involved:
dressing up and leaving home
approaching people we wanted to meet
risking getting embarrassed in public
And in the end, why would you? It’s much safer—and easier—to just swipe from the couch.
Sadly, this also meant it became harder to form “deeper” relationships because we stopped trying. Having an easier solution didn’t make the old efforts ineffective…but it did make them much rarer. After all, now the easy way is “normal”, most people start believing there’s just no need to put in the effort.
Here’s the kicker: people who put in the effort anyway are the ones getting great results.
The more I think about it, the more I see it’s the same everywhere
It’s like we handed everyone a printing press, whether or not they had anything worth printing.
Just think about any of these.
Someone who tries to build a software product purely with “vibe coding” (I still can’t stand that term). AI coding tools have made understanding code optional, but people without an understanding will always build inferior software compared to those who know what they’re doing.
Someone who sends hundreds of templated messages to try to win jobs on Upwork. Such platforms make it easy to reach lots of people. But it’s still the ones who selectively write tailored applications for fewer jobs who get better results.
And yep—someone who asks AI to write hundreds of 800-word blog posts. We could take the time to study a field and craft content people actually want to read. But it remains easier to just ask ChatGPT to do it all for us.
I’d argue that in all the above cases, no one actually believes the shortcut creates better—or even equal—results. But the fact remains that most people are looking for the easiest way to produce any result, let alone the best.
Not only do tooling and platforms often give them a way to do exactly that, but they also make it normal to put even less work in.
It’s like we handed everyone a printing press, whether or not they had anything worth printing.
And weirdly? A lot of the time, I believe the easy way is perfectly fine.
The simple reason: half-assing something is often better than not bothering at all (let’s admit it, we’ve all been there). Just remember, this means you’ll be competing with the 90% of the other people who are also getting half-assed results.
But if you’d rather excel? It’s no longer about being heroic. It’s about going beyond the bare minimum.
And that’s exactly what to keep in mind when you’re figuring out how to partake. You’re not competing in a sea of experts; you’re competing with noisy mediocrity.
Especially if your content is trying to win decision moments for your business, the noisy mediocrity won’t win.
Competence is a scarce asset again
Tools like AI will keep lowering the bar.
But it will never completely disappear. Most people will use it as a license to stop jumping.
And that’s why the internet feels so polluted right now: “throughput” of content has entirely stopped being a problem. But what that’s left us with is a complete dearth of quality.
Especially with software and SEO content, the internet is filling up with content that just…works. It might run, it might rank temporarily, but it’s often thin/flimsy.
Here’s how to leverage the situation.
Build evergreen assets; don’t just write for reach. Whenever you publish anything, even if it’s time-sensitive, you should aim to have something you’re proud of in a year’s time. Even catching trends is fine. Just don’t see each post as a roll of the dice.
Aim to actually be helpful with your content. Most content is written purely to market something or catch people’s attention. Taking the extra time to write content that brings real value immediately separates you from 80% of people out there.
Exceed the average, especially where it’s visible. Think of people responding to social media posts with messages like “Totally agree” or “nice one”. Come on. It takes 15 seconds to craft a reply that actually adds to a conversation.
It’s not sexy. It’s not always fun. And it’s certainly not a zero-effort path to any goal.
But whilst the harder path is rarer, it’s not obsolete.
After all, excellence hasn’t got any harder. It just got rarer at the same time average got louder.
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