alt Hacker News> 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.
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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.
> Let's put the blame where it belongs. Monopolistic companies destroyed the internet.
This is also true for more than just the internet.
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.
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.