It went from an Internet of amateurs (those with an actual love for what they are talking about) to professionals (which are very slick, but the money is always there).
You can still find great content in videos and music from amateurs, but the professionals "outshout" most of them; and the best amateurs end up getting sucked into being professionals. Once your livelihood is on the line, things change.
Here's a simple example. In the mid 90s, if you found a website with recipes, it would have been by a cook with some technical ability and it would have been dedicated to recipes.
Such sites may still exist, but heaven help trying to find them amongst all the "professional" recipe SEO spam that exists today.
Not bombcar, but I take it to mean that professionals have more resources they can pour into publicizing their stuff. It's not so much taking away amateurs' space as overwhelming amateurs' voices, thereby diminishing their power.
I just don't understand it. Publishing space online is infinite and will continue to be infinite no matter how popular somebody else gets. Who gets overwhelmed by somebody else publishing something?
Those with more resources have...more resources. More money they can put into spreading their word wider. They often know people in media who can increase the number of voices that are talking, the ears that are hearing. I can say anything I want online, as many times as I want. I still won't have the reach of someone who is boosted by national news, the New York Times, a Facebook group with thousands of member, a friendly YouTube or TikTok influencer.
The users have a certain responsibility for finding what they are interested in themselves. If you rely only on Google in this year, you will miss out. Everything can not be on the front page at the same time. It's the same if you go to a store IRL, with the exception that you of course are free to start your browsing anywhere else than on Google - like most people do today with social media.
I describe it as, the internet of books and text became the internet of videos and music.
Except that the internet never was books, and was only text due to technological limitations.
When we started networking all the computers together, we (myself included) had this vision of an information utopia where everyone would be able to access all of the information previously locked up in books, magazines, and newspapers.
But that never really happened. Instead, people started making new content — the faster, cheaper, and lower quality, the better.
The old content remained locked up in libraries. Some of it managed to move behind paywalls, but the vast majority of the information — and lessons — learned in the last 500 years has been forgotten because it's not free and easy to access.
We had this naïve vision that with everyone online, people would rally around the best of what humanity had to offer, and we'd all be exposed to the planet's best art, literature, music, and knowledge. Instead, we got mostly the exact opposite of what we set out to build.
>the vast majority of the information — and lessons — learned in the last 500 years has been forgotten because it's not free and easy to access.
I guess I don't really agree with that. Yes, a lot of very detailed information (and primary sources) about things is in research libraries, at least some of which are not open to the general public. But that doesn't mean all that information is lost. A lot of historical information is accessible to the (admittedly relatively small percentage of) people willing to put the effort into digging it up.
> had this vision of an information utopia where everyone
When it comes to new technology and the impact it will have people are almost always wrong. The printing press not only made better books, it created oceans of shitty ones.
But we've had Sturgeon's Revelation[0] since 1957, and the idea has existed much longer. Why would one expect anything different just because it's "on the internet?"
