[sanderjd]

I could be convinced of this narrative. Like, if someone writes a book about this, with good evidence of what caused this to happen, I might find that persuasive.

But to me, what happened was social media and video becoming the locus of attention. I don't think people stopped putting content on independent websites because their traffic from search results went down, I think they just started putting content on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and YouTube and TikTok instead. To me, the whole way the web is used just changed over this period of time, in ways that mostly had very little to do with Google's search algorithm.