• KiaKaha [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I miss the early days of internet ideology.

    Say what you like about 2010s techno-libertarians; what came after was a whole lot worse.

    • DoghouseCharlie [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I really think it had to do with the 2008 crash. People used to just make flash animated cartoons and host them on their own websites for free. No one does that now unless it's funded through Patreon and put behind paywalls or is otherwise some kind of grift. Even affluent crackers are more desperate than they used to be.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I don't think it's that, I think it's a skills problem.

        Back in the day we had creative-social-media, which I will differentiate from just regular social media because it's focused on what you can make. These sites were things like albinoblacksheep, newgrounds, deviantart, etc etc.

        What these sites did was put creation at the centre of the social media gamification. Your success as a user on these platforms was determined by how well you can get the community of the platform to vote for your content.

        These platforms appealed to a generation, aged with their generation, and then failed to appeal to a new generation as the old generation aged into different things. They were responsible for teaching people the skills that produced bizarre totally free content and the knock on effect of this skill creation could be seen elsewhere on the web.

        Now? These platforms are dead and other social media that puts different things at the center of its content flow promote entirely different skillsets. Youtube was nearly nonexistent in the newgrounds hayday whereas today it promotes a very specific skillset in succeeding. TikTok similarly. Twitter similarly. Reddit similarly. All of them require quite specific skillsets to be learned to succeed.

        Unfortunately none of them promote the skillsets that the era of the internet you're talking about did. The very very small number of people producing content that content now is significantly more valuable than it was then. It no longer does it for free because it no longer has much competition for their works and can monetise. If any of them had tried to monetise their work back in the old era when everyone and their dog was being taught the basic skills they wouldn't have been able to do it.

        I see it as an economically produced situation based on incentive and skill production of the social media sites of each popular era of the internet. The more competition(in terms of success on the social platforms of the day) there is for labourers skilled in a particular task the more free output of that skill occurs.

      • CommCat [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        did youtube start monetizing before or after 2008? I think that really started the ball rolling with every one trying to make $$ off any type of media content.