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I had hoped that the continual advancement in electronics would mean the marginal cost of simply "putting something out there" on the internet would drop to nea

I had hoped that the continual advancement in electronics would mean the marginal cost of simply "putting something out there" on the internet would drop to near zero. While several platforms exist where a user can basically broadcast for 'free' (like on Twitter/Facebook/Medium/YouTube) all of that is still wrapped up in some kind of monetization or other scheme. I'm not naïve enough to think a significant number of people would produce high quality content for free, but I do yearn for the days of the old 90's Netscape Composer websites that were chock full of information with no expectation of turning it into some kind of revenue stream.

meheleventyone 5y ago
Thing is masses of people make high quality content for free on all these platforms (and elsewhere) it's just next to no one gets to see it. Massive centralization happened because discovery of content is easier for the audience. But discovery of specific content has not gotten any better, if anything in a world curated by algorithm with much greater participation it's got significantly worse. The main issue is both monetization and distribution/discovery for digital content follow a power law. If you want to make something and have an audience you need to be one of the vanishingly small number of people that "make it". Otherwise you're just facing a massive uphill climb against entrenched people who hold all the cards. Right now if you want a good chance to get into a space you either need to have big resources behind you or to be one of the first movers into it. If you're some random person even if you make great stuff you stand next to no chance of blowing up because the entire audience is hovered up by the big names. This leads to people burning out en masse and their content being even harder to find. Basically we need more equitable discovery of quality content rather than just chasing metrics which leads to this entrenchment. And stable career paths for people.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  centralization also caused a natural pressure to prune all the mild content, it was inefficient (lots of politics and stuff like that) but it made a kind of ladder.. internet creates puddles, anybody can join, so they do and they had little value
- nullc 5y ago
  > it's just next to no one gets to see it. It's not quite that bad, but our standards of success have changed. If your garage band threw a couple concerts and across them got and attendance of 1000 people that would have been a smashing success. Put your music on youtube and get 1000 listeners and it's a failure.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    That’s because 1000 listeners versus 1000 attendees isn’t really a like for like comparison. Getting people to come and see a band live involves a whole lot more effort on the audiences part. Similarly live performances are worth much more than listening to recorded performances. I actually agree with the 100/1000 true fans essays it’s just the realities of platform capitalism means most creative people capable of such an audience will never be discovered by it.
helen___keller 5y ago
> I had hoped that the continual advancement in electronics would mean the marginal cost of simply "putting something out there" on the internet would drop to near zero. This has happened even if you're excluding the usual ad-funded crowd. The difference is that supporting a billion users will obviously never be near zero cost, so any platforms with that level of usage are the ones with monetization streams (or are venture funded and will be monetized in the future, looking at you Discord). With that in mind you can actually self host at a near-zero cost, entry tier VPS instances are dirt cheap, and there's even cheaper choices if your content is simple enough (e.g. just a static HTML site). If you want to store a few GB of content, you can get that on a major cloud for very cheap. All of this together, you can get a significant amount of data hosted with many 9s of uptime on a large cloud for a scant few dollars a month. If you want to use your own hardware, you can buy a raspberry pi and get hosting ridiculously cheap. All that said, these options require technical expertise, which I think is the real failure. Lots of people have content but not the technical expertise to put it anywhere other than youtube/instagram/reddit/facebook/twitter
- simonh 5y ago
  Companies like square space and wix will host your content for very little, and provide all the tools you need. Google Sites is free. I share content in Google docs.

meheleventyone 5y ago

Thing is masses of people make high quality content for free on all these platforms (and elsewhere) it's just next to no one gets to see it. Massive centralization happened because discovery of content is easier for the audience. But discovery of specific content has not gotten any better, if anything in a world curated by algorithm with much greater participation it's got significantly worse. The main issue is both monetization and distribution/discovery for digital content follow a power law. If you want to make something and have an audience you need to be one of the vanishingly small number of people that "make it". Otherwise you're just facing a massive uphill climb against entrenched people who hold all the cards. Right now if you want a good chance to get into a space you either need to have big resources behind you or to be one of the first movers into it. If you're some random person even if you make great stuff you stand next to no chance of blowing up because the entire audience is hovered up by the big names. This leads to people burning out en masse and their content being even harder to find. Basically we need more equitable discovery of quality content rather than just chasing metrics which leads to this entrenchment. And stable career paths for people.

agumonkey 5y ago
centralization also caused a natural pressure to prune all the mild content, it was inefficient (lots of politics and stuff like that) but it made a kind of ladder.. internet creates puddles, anybody can join, so they do and they had little value
nullc 5y ago
> it's just next to no one gets to see it. It's not quite that bad, but our standards of success have changed. If your garage band threw a couple concerts and across them got and attendance of 1000 people that would have been a smashing success. Put your music on youtube and get 1000 listeners and it's a failure.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  That’s because 1000 listeners versus 1000 attendees isn’t really a like for like comparison. Getting people to come and see a band live involves a whole lot more effort on the audiences part. Similarly live performances are worth much more than listening to recorded performances. I actually agree with the 100/1000 true fans essays it’s just the realities of platform capitalism means most creative people capable of such an audience will never be discovered by it.

helen___keller 5y ago

> I had hoped that the continual advancement in electronics would mean the marginal cost of simply "putting something out there" on the internet would drop to near zero. This has happened even if you're excluding the usual ad-funded crowd. The difference is that supporting a billion users will obviously never be near zero cost, so any platforms with that level of usage are the ones with monetization streams (or are venture funded and will be monetized in the future, looking at you Discord). With that in mind you can actually self host at a near-zero cost, entry tier VPS instances are dirt cheap, and there's even cheaper choices if your content is simple enough (e.g. just a static HTML site). If you want to store a few GB of content, you can get that on a major cloud for very cheap. All of this together, you can get a significant amount of data hosted with many 9s of uptime on a large cloud for a scant few dollars a month. If you want to use your own hardware, you can buy a raspberry pi and get hosting ridiculously cheap. All that said, these options require technical expertise, which I think is the real failure. Lots of people have content but not the technical expertise to put it anywhere other than youtube/instagram/reddit/facebook/twitter

simonh 5y ago
Companies like square space and wix will host your content for very little, and provide all the tools you need. Google Sites is free. I share content in Google docs.