> The trick is to not fight the spam.

I agree here, reacting to those blogs would be akin to feeding trolls. The added attention would help them.

> There's plenty of good stuff out there

yes!

> and it's easy to find if people try.

I'm not to sure about that, clever SEO is more and more dominating.

Just today I tried finding old threads of mine on Perlmonks via DuckDuckGo and got only hits on StackOverflow. (WTF?)

> However, the people most affected by bad sources

Mass matters and at some point the dams breaks , and not only out of laziness.

Of course I can tell people "don't trust the search engines", "ask me" or "read good books". But who will constantly spend 10min to 1h for the latter if the search engine is only seconds away?

And I agree with kikuchiyo here, that the economical aspect plays a role.

Producing nonsense also takes energy and time. But once it is cheap enough to use "AI" for that, we might end up in a sea of BS.

As an example:

Just look at how the quality ensuring mechanisms of "old media" were already bypassed by algorithms and trolls spamming "new media".

That was already possible with "old media" - like "letter to the editors", buying journalists or whole outlets - but is now far cheaper.