I have a theory that part of why you don't see such great niche sites now is that they were the productive of cognitive surplus. People had spare brain power and not that much to do with it, so they built and contributed to fun sites.
Now, FB and YouTube and Tiktok etc have gotten very good at consuming all that free time and energy.
They have become good at capturing that surplus. People are still doing amazing things, and these platforms give them the tools to publish videos, an audience, and monetisation opportunities. However the platforms giveth, then taketh away.
Hard to say. People certainly seem pretty motivated (and better equipped than 10-20 years ago) to create content for money. It just feels like there is less whimsical, fun expenditure of effort.
A lot of what is being created is fairly derivative though, it's often more like a grift than an act of innovation. Actually coming up with something new damn near requires a fair bit of cognitive surplus.
Yeah, Kevin Munger's book skillfully dissects what he calls "The YouTube Apparatus" [0]
The creators aren't really tuning their output based on consumer feedback, they're actually optimizing for the platform's metrics, so it's the (algorithmic) machine incentivizing humans to essentially feed it money.
You don’t see it because we’re all back in the gated community of AOL, but rather than clicking on an icon to a community you click a Google search result.
I can see some of it coming back. Myself I find AI has restored my joy with development by removing most of the drudge and leaving me to be mostly in charges of ideas and direction. It has reduced the amount of time required to build something and works around some of that metacognitive laziness that had crept in.
Now, FB and YouTube and Tiktok etc have gotten very good at consuming all that free time and energy.
Just a theory.