A certain amount of people probably would have taken the time to learn how to do something like host a web page on shared hosting or even github pages, but don't because it's both easier to upload to a platform, and you get infinitely more reach - sometimes facilitated by the platform (e.g. TikTok often promotes <10 view videos to gauge them, and will skyrocket a post from an otherwise new account if enough viewers interact with the video).
However, if these platforms exist, there's no telling how many multitudes more people wouldn't even attempt to put stuff online. Life is busy and spending even an hour setting up an online presence on the "open web" is too much for most people.
Yep. Most of the non-developers probably couldn't set up a HTML page. And the developers can also be too busy.
Many years ago, I wrote my own homepage in PHP. With every version of PHP it needed to be fixed again, so after a few years I gave up. I tried to install some existing software, but you need to update that regularly, too often. So now I am happy that there is Substack I can write on (despite complaining about its functionality all the time), because otherwise I wouldn't have a blog.
This is a feedback loop though. It is a reflection of the moderation wars in some ways: Google’s main job now is to try to keep you away from malicious sites as much as find good ones.
So they prioritize ‘known good’ sites (big platforms, major companies, etc.) over unknown, individual sites. Then, since it’s now harder to be seen as your individual site (and less work), this pushes people to move to higher ranked platforms. This increases the ratio of noise (the ratio of spam/malicious sites increases compared to good ones) making it worthwhile to skew more towards results from platforms, etc.
Platforms also have the benefit in that it’s a lot harder for a YouTube video to be malicious, giving them more freedom to take chances recommending unknown content. It still could be hate mail, but at least it’s not going to ransomware you.
I kind of hope some walled gardens pop up and close off other parts of the internet.
I still reflect when I go back on tours of 70s / 80s / 90s media, and while I get some of the "oldies tour" is also kind of a "greatest hits" effect, but there seemed to be a lot more creativity, especially wacky creativity, in the past.
Some of that is callous mass market media calculations by "big media": multi-hundred million dollar movies/games aren't going to be off the beaten path.
What is strange is the ARMIES of "content producers" and all they do is produce things in basically the same way.
So the "SEO" optimization seems to clip the wings of all grassroots content production. Google should have enabled the long tail. It ... sort of ... has, but man its hard to find it drowned out by all the mediocre crap out there.
People don't seem to be isolated from the internet and let some path of creativity percolate for years or even decades like what used to happen. Internet monoculture really seems to be destroying interesting creativity more than it delivers novel creativity from around the world.
"Comorbidity" with this is the death of patience and attention for wacky stuff, people click away too quickly.
About the only actual evidence I can deliver is the oppressive nature of the cinema sequel. For some reason, I just mark the first Matrix movie (1999) as the death of creativity in Hollywood.
However, of course, that may be the point in the 18-40 demo that I aged out of the great popular culture recycling machine. I think a lot of that 18-40 demographic number comes from the fact that by the time you hit 40, you've seen all the tricks, and the repackaging of the tricks/tropes just seems cheap compared to the "original" experience you had with the trick/trope.
