> The dead internet theory terrifies me. I don't think we're at the point where it's mostly dead
Well - I would say the internet is not totally dead yet, but we approach the point of it being very useless now. I remember the 1990s era and early 2000s - it was almost innocent compared to the total slop era we have now. Young people today don't even know that Google Search was useful at one point in time. If you use Google Search now, you get so much irrelevant crap output that it is really useless now.
Ironically, the reason I used Google the most then was because it indexed Usenet while so many other parts of the Internet offered by the other engines were "slop". My, how the turn tables.