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The shape of attention has changed. It's true that now more than ever, niche super creators have found an audience. I think the paradox here is, because of spe

The shape of attention has changed. It's true that now more than ever, niche super creators have found an audience. I think the paradox here is, because of specifically this, not so gifted people have less incentive to create. 30 years ago, there simply was no spreading of media that wasn't so mainstream. So there was no medium for a lot of niches. Without the medium, people felt rewarded in their local community for showing something interesting that had no mainstream analog. In a sense, the niche creators that were great were more effectively broadcast leaving less audience for worse niche creators. This, over time, meant that less people tried to create and switched to critique.

082349872349872 2y ago
> less people tried to create and switched to critique. I'm not convinced of that — I suspect that in earlier times, there were just as few creators, but we didn't get exposed to all* the critiques. (for instance, if I were to make this argument I'd have to go back much earlier than 30 years, because 30 years ago people were already putting their S&M Barbies up on the web; we were already on the second generation of browsers: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/mosaic-netscape-0-9-was-released-30-years-ago-today/ ) However, under the hypothesis that fewer people try to create and switch to critique instead: that'd be their problem. EDIT: * eg, the other day on Zhihu I saw someone asking "What is even the point of Joker 2?" Nowadays we can see criticism from 5 billion people without even scrolling down.