I didn't really understand this article. My interpretation was all of these spammy sites that steal and scrape content will overtake all of those that actually produce things. But the spammy sites still need to get their content somewhere and finding the content's original source can't be too hard. Or did I totally miss the point?
They're trying to say something beyond that, but I'm not sure what it is either.
It looks to me like an accident in the metaphor factory. Someone decided that using a fast-food metaphor might yield insight into the future of the publishing business -- hence, this essay. But that's an inane metaphor. The food business is very, very different from the publishing business. Fast food joints like McDonald's succeed because, among other things, great chefs do not scale: I can't click a button and eat a meal made by Jamie Oliver, because the guy lives in another country and food can't travel over TCP/IP; even if it could it can't be copied using rsync; the guy only has two hands and there's a line out the door for tables; the quality depends on ingredients which cost a lot; and even if I have a great meal on Tuesday there's no guarantee that Jamie's Wednesday meal will be great -- maybe Wednesday's special is made with basil, but I'm allergic to basil.
But none of this is a problem with publishing in the age of the Internet.
He's saying that the mass-produced crap "content" sites will all dominate the search result listings and push all the quality content sites out of business because noone will visit them.
But we're not using search engines to get to every place on the web. We learn where the quality content is, we don't rely on generic portals for news and articles. We learn which blogs are good. We get sites recommended by our friends. We find sites and bookmark them and revisit if they're good.
He still has the old school media mindset that the scoop is the important thing, and he wants respect for being the first one to find out something. Of course, the fact that he's a prime source for the echo chamber means things seem like they have more sources than they do.
But the problem for sites like TC is not that people won't find good news using HN-like sites. The problem is that will not be making money through Google search.
You have to understand that people going to TC through HN or Digg means nothing for them. These people don't click on ads, they are there just to read news and click away. The money is made on people that click through a Google link, because these are the ones that are looking for something specific and ready to click on an ad.
So the problem he is talking about is that is getting harder to get into Google, since sites like eHow are flooding Google with all this dubious content.
