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Not the entire premise. There's an additional desire or hope for attention and money now. That's the piece that was absent and relatively impossible back then,

Not the entire premise. There's an additional desire or hope for attention and money now. That's the piece that was absent and relatively impossible back then, that is obviously being eschewed by "Cat Man" to the delight of the author. Edit: and those platforms actively work to "optimize" the former into the latter wherever possible.

dymk 7y ago
> There's an additional desire or hope for attention and money now Maybe not "money" because there weren't ways to easily monetize content, but Web 1.0 certainly was about hoping people would see what you posted. Let's not re-write Web 1.0's history with an aura of innocence, as if human motivation for attention somehow changed in the last 10 years.
- rdiddly 7y ago
  Then: attention. Now: attention and money. You kind of summarized my comment.
  - dymk 7y ago
    Well, you said attention and money were the new desire
    - rdiddly 7y ago
      Yeah I probably should've refined it. Actually now I'm thinking about it and there's probably even a qualitative difference between "attention" 1.0 and "attention" 2.0. To use a metaphor, it's kind of like artisanal attention vs. mass-produced attention. 1.0: One or two people find your site organically and engage with it on a deep level (because maybe there's nothing else out there for that particular interest). 2.0: You're hoping thousands of people see it and click "like." So I'm using the mass-production analogy to capture the fact that there's more of it, an abundance of it, yet each one individually is less special or lower quality (but good enough), and mediated by a machine. You can buy 20 sweaters at the store, all identical, all knitted in minutes by a machine, vs. having your grandma slave away over one sweater for two weeks of evenings. The machine-made sweaters are more precise and excellent in the technical sense, and there are more of them, while the grandma one is more special and one-of-a-kind, and has flaws, and has "flaws." (The part that didn't change is that people still need sweaters.)

dymk 7y ago

> There's an additional desire or hope for attention and money now Maybe not "money" because there weren't ways to easily monetize content, but Web 1.0 certainly was about hoping people would see what you posted. Let's not re-write Web 1.0's history with an aura of innocence, as if human motivation for attention somehow changed in the last 10 years.

rdiddly 7y ago
Then: attention. Now: attention and money. You kind of summarized my comment.
- dymk 7y ago
  Well, you said attention and money were the new desire
  - rdiddly 7y ago
    Yeah I probably should've refined it. Actually now I'm thinking about it and there's probably even a qualitative difference between "attention" 1.0 and "attention" 2.0. To use a metaphor, it's kind of like artisanal attention vs. mass-produced attention. 1.0: One or two people find your site organically and engage with it on a deep level (because maybe there's nothing else out there for that particular interest). 2.0: You're hoping thousands of people see it and click "like." So I'm using the mass-production analogy to capture the fact that there's more of it, an abundance of it, yet each one individually is less special or lower quality (but good enough), and mediated by a machine. You can buy 20 sweaters at the store, all identical, all knitted in minutes by a machine, vs. having your grandma slave away over one sweater for two weeks of evenings. The machine-made sweaters are more precise and excellent in the technical sense, and there are more of them, while the grandma one is more special and one-of-a-kind, and has flaws, and has "flaws." (The part that didn't change is that people still need sweaters.)