Do you mean Joe the Plumber from London, UK or Joe the Plumber from London, Ohio ?
We all know how this ends up. It ends up being like Google where the search engine uses word embeddings and the like and removes word from your search queries or replaces November by December because they are both months so you can substitute one for the other right ?
It's sad the article is paywalled because I have developed this theory as well.
(this is the copy paste of a recent HN commment)
> I call it the paradox of discussions on the internet. When it comes to some topic (eg language learning) everything has already been said somewhere by someone very clever. So in the grand scheme of life the value of my contribution to a conversation is 0. Now, if instead of wasting my (and everyone's) time in a pointless discussion I write an in depth blog post or make some creation of some sort that expresses my thought in a deep way and share it then I become a spammer. Whereas a one liner written by a newb or a comment that is posted everyday with a slightly different wording is a 'contribution'.
It seems to be down as well. I knew it would happen with the whole Elon Musk stuff but that still makes me very unhappy.