@vortex_egg Somewhat paradoxically, the infoglut is in large part a consequence of the loss of gatekeepers.
The total amount of information being created hasn't actually changed ... all that much (a huge explosion in population and literacy over, say, the past 200 years notwithstanding). But the amount of information generated from, say, 2001 to 2021 is ... within reason, about the same.
What's changed is that people can now publish far more. Publishers previously served multiple roles, a key one being gatekeeping. Queue Clay Shirky: it's not information overload, it's filter failure".
(Cory Doctorow writes on this a whole lot.)
The other side is that distribution has become far cheaper. So now instead of, say, a handful of broadcast TV channels, a local daily paper or two, and a few magazine subscriptions, 5 billioin people on Earth now have access to pretty much any serial stream anywhere. Mind that a lot of those simply re-publish the same stories. Or memes.
A daily paper would typically run ~100--500 original-content items (more in the Sunday edition, for English-langauge pubs). The news wieres -- AP, Reuters, UPI, AFP --- run about 1k--5k items/day. (I'd looked this up a few years back, on the #Dreddit).
Hacker News keeps a daily record of the top 100 items carried (https://news.ycombinator.com/front/), which makes an interesting time-capsule to go exploring. But there are thousands of items submitted per day.
Facebook IIRC sees on the order of a billion items posted per day. The vast majority of those are of course seen by nobody.
Attention is the inverse of content abundance. More content means less attention to each item.
(This is frequently lost on those promoting "new media" and noting how high-quality or exemplary it is in its initial stages. This too shall pass.)
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