[specialist]

Not a slippery slope. That's exactly what happened.

You've (unironically?) restated the crux of the Dead Internet Theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

Authentic human activity has been completely overwhelmed by bots and slop. Discerning signal from noise becomes too burdensome to bother with.

Of course the physical medium continues to exist.

Of course there are still humans, such as yourself, producing free content, to be harvested and regurgitated by parasites.

But authentic human activity is increasingly going out of band, no longer discoverable. Whatsapp, discord, private groups. Exactly as the theory predicted.