3 ms·

Seriously? We live in a golden age of creation now, it takes just a minimum effort to find good content, compared to what it was before.

fzeroracer 8y ago
The downside of living in a 'golden age of creation' is that said creation is also taken advantage of by unscrupulous actors looking to take advantage of users by flooding content gateways with scam artist level content. Steam for example has had to deal with people embedding miners in their games, asset flips and games designed for the sake of selling cards on the digital marketplace. Youtube has auto-generated videos designed to take advantage of their recommendation algorithm to reach people that are less capable of curating content themselves like kids. Not to mention the algorithmic rabbit hole you can be taken down leading into extreme conspiracy theory territory and viewbots which push non-popular content out of the way. And I could talk at lengths at how companies abuse the various app stores by creating keyword spaghetti such as 'Fortnight Battle Royale Mini Battleground Survival' designed in order to fool people while making money off of a barrage of in-game ads. Without curation, you're accepting that a certain portion of your users are going to be scammers and that some users will be scammed. Whether it's through gaming the views, the search engine or the recommendation algorithms.
MrEldritch 8y ago
I'm not sure that's true. From my perspective, it seems like the golden age of creation may have been a few years ago - peaking around, say, the 2009-early10's-ish region. When stuff like Flash was big, but the Internet was still pretty experimental and not quite as cordoned off into walled gardens and laser-guided algorithmic ad-friendly-filtered channels, and the really big-budget content creators and networks hadn't quite rolled in yet. You had tons of people making absolute crap, but it was inventive crap, and some of it wasn't crap at all. When was the last time you saw anything as weird, experimental, and creative as, say, Homestuck? (Which was a huge multimedia webcomic...thing combining art, music, Flash animations, small interactive games, and a deeply ridiculous story centered around time travel and the meaning of online friendships.) Or something like Homestar Runner? What's the best webcomic you've found that was started in the past 5 years? The best new blog? YouTube's been getting increasingly dry and filtered as ad scare after ad scare forces people to tone down their content - even things like science channels have been getting hit for seeming too dangerous. The move off of forums and blogs to content platforms means that the kinds of expression that are even possible is increasingly restricted. Across the whole web, the rise of higher-budget and more-professional stuff has been discouraging and driving out weird amateur crap from getting started in the first place - meaning that it never develops into higher-quality stuff that would bring those novel ideas to a shine. It's easier than ever to find polished content, but the diversity of that content is usually less, and still shrinking.

fzeroracer 8y ago

The downside of living in a 'golden age of creation' is that said creation is also taken advantage of by unscrupulous actors looking to take advantage of users by flooding content gateways with scam artist level content. Steam for example has had to deal with people embedding miners in their games, asset flips and games designed for the sake of selling cards on the digital marketplace. Youtube has auto-generated videos designed to take advantage of their recommendation algorithm to reach people that are less capable of curating content themselves like kids. Not to mention the algorithmic rabbit hole you can be taken down leading into extreme conspiracy theory territory and viewbots which push non-popular content out of the way. And I could talk at lengths at how companies abuse the various app stores by creating keyword spaghetti such as 'Fortnight Battle Royale Mini Battleground Survival' designed in order to fool people while making money off of a barrage of in-game ads. Without curation, you're accepting that a certain portion of your users are going to be scammers and that some users will be scammed. Whether it's through gaming the views, the search engine or the recommendation algorithms.

MrEldritch 8y ago

I'm not sure that's true. From my perspective, it seems like the golden age of creation may have been a few years ago - peaking around, say, the 2009-early10's-ish region. When stuff like Flash was big, but the Internet was still pretty experimental and not quite as cordoned off into walled gardens and laser-guided algorithmic ad-friendly-filtered channels, and the really big-budget content creators and networks hadn't quite rolled in yet. You had tons of people making absolute crap, but it was inventive crap, and some of it wasn't crap at all. When was the last time you saw anything as weird, experimental, and creative as, say, Homestuck? (Which was a huge multimedia webcomic...thing combining art, music, Flash animations, small interactive games, and a deeply ridiculous story centered around time travel and the meaning of online friendships.) Or something like Homestar Runner? What's the best webcomic you've found that was started in the past 5 years? The best new blog? YouTube's been getting increasingly dry and filtered as ad scare after ad scare forces people to tone down their content - even things like science channels have been getting hit for seeming too dangerous. The move off of forums and blogs to content platforms means that the kinds of expression that are even possible is increasingly restricted. Across the whole web, the rise of higher-budget and more-professional stuff has been discouraging and driving out weird amateur crap from getting started in the first place - meaning that it never develops into higher-quality stuff that would bring those novel ideas to a shine. It's easier than ever to find polished content, but the diversity of that content is usually less, and still shrinking.