You shouldn't just assume that the inverse would be free from fraud. The incentives for fraud still apply even when the system is not democratized.

The Library of Babel comparison is too fatalistic imo, even granting that it's maybe just an extreme example. The real world doesn't quite resemble a closed system with no metadata. We can still establish chains of trust.

Whether or not people will build resilient chains is another story, contingent on whether the strength of that chain actually matters to people. It probably doesn't for a lot of people. Boo. But inasmuch as I care, I feel I ought to be free to try and derive a strong signal through the noise.

In what way was it was democratised? We're not talking about Substacks and YouTube channels here, we're not even talking about arXiv preprints and the like, we're talking about peer-reviewed journal publications, and that system remains gated in much the same way that it was in the 1980s when it comes to trying to publish in it. If anything this system is the poster child for top-down gatekeeping by the recognised authorities, and it's precisely the value of that official recognition that makes people so desperate to break into it. The major changes seem to have been the easy availability of author publication lists and the advent of publication metrics, not things which have been or were ever meant to be particularly democratising for would-be authors; and an increase in the number of people playing the game, driven to a large extent by increasing participation from developing countries, and hopefully not many people would have the gall to argue for a ban on developing-country participation.

Tearing down gatekeeping (i.e. "high standards") in pursuit of maximal inclusivity is just another way of saying "regression to the mean."

The gate has been removed from the signal chain, and now the noise floor is at infinity.