How the Creator Economy Destroyed the Internet

> How the creator economy destroyed the internet

Let's put the blame where it belongs. Monopolistic companies destroyed the internet.

> This is the media ecosystem we live in now — a supercharged shopping system that thrives on outrage, dominates the culture, and resists any real scrutiny because no one’s really in charge

That's the media ecosystem you've lived in your entire life. The internet, as always, just scaled up what we already had.

True, and I trust then that we look toward what actually fixes this, which is (boring) regulation and anti-trust work.

It's been done before, time to revamp for a new generation.

> Let's put the blame where it belongs. Monopolistic companies destroyed the internet.

This is also true for more than just the internet.

For real. I used think that society really suffered from a fractured media ecosystem compared to the monolithic pre-internet media era until I learned about how the US gov used the media to sway public opinion on invading Iraq back in 2003.

I don’t know if the current media environment is better than what we had then, but it’s pretty foolish to think that it’s automatically worse based on US foreign policy going back the last 50 years alone.

IMO this really misses the changes that the democratization of access to attention and media caused. Anyone being able to directly reach anyone is a massive change from the gate-kept pre-internet media landscape.

> Anyone being able to directly reach anyone is a massive change from the gate-kept pre-internet media landscape.

Sure, but how are we supposed to disentangle this change from the concurrent growth of algorithmic feeds driving what people see? I have no doubt that democratization of communication would have social effects on its own, but we don't really know what those would be sans the simultaneous centralizing effect that dominant social media companies impose.

The media ecosystem many of us had lived in included that but was not almost entirely that.

We had local newspapers, weeklies, and magazines, with local owners and editors, printing at local print shops, subsidized by local advertisers, dropped in boxes and stacked at local community hubs by local kids. Same for local radio stations and local television networks, although these had such high capital and regulation requirements that many of them were already being soaked up into larger networks more quickly.

As the online stuff emerged, we had local BBS's, and local forums and websites and blogs operated by local people, made known through the above local media channels or just through word of mouth.

Writers and editors and artists and merchants would be real people that circulated in the community, who would encounter readers/viewers/consumers face to face. Earnest small businesses that served a niche in the community could call up and get a reasonable price for an ad slot or classified listing without always having to bid in an auction against against an national brand with an effectively unlimited budget.

The last 10-20 years of the Internet, of social media and consolidation and the "Creator Economy", didn't just "scale up what we already had" -- it scaled up one small thing that we already had and displaced more or less everything else.

I think it's pretty easy to see on the face of it that a direct access for anyone to potentially reach everyone is a massive change from a system where that gets filtered through media companies. We don't really have to decide how much of which effect we attribute to that it's a fundamental reordering of the ecosystem of media production and consumption.

It was even easier before genAI and NLP where you could reliably say they're not really putting forward precise variants of genres because there just wasn't the capability of distinguishing (and still to this day I think they'd have trouble) genuine vs bait versions of videos. I think people want to believe the algorithm is more manipulated than it is generally because it serves a bunch of junk and it's more appealing to believe it's being pushed rather than that's just what people consume a lot of.

For a completely anecdotal bit of anecdata I've had good luck over the years with stuff like the Youtube algorithm because I've been fairly judicious with the "don't show me this" button(s) and I habitually watch stuff I know is pure junk food in an incognito window instead of on my 'main' feed.

Craigslist killed off the classified section which was a big income source for newspapers. People didn't mind because Craigslist was free for most users.

I tend to agree on your algorithm point. But one distinction, which i think is a valid one, is that the algorithm is designed to over correct to what people's impulses are and that is is a design choice so there is a "guiding" principle there.

i.e. selecting for what people linger on rather than what they click for instance. People might stare at a car crash in passing but that isn't exactly the same as what they want but algorithm design choices means that it reflects that as a genuine want. And the resulting feedback loop means more people start doing car crash content and ultimately over time narrows what is produced