Replying to @lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com
i think their guess is right on the money
My best guess (and to be clear, this is a guess): Google decided they could no longer effectively identify and swat away SEO slop, and figured that just massively nerfing brand new domains was their next best option.
this makes a lot of sense if you’ve tried searching for literally anything nowadays – most of the results are generated AI slop for the specific keywords you’ve searched for – can only imagine the nightmare if you could do this for a whole domain subtree – such a shame that because of slop actually useful wikis have to suffer – abs atrocious