[nonbirithm]

And this time it's not only driven by larger media organizations, but also by random people who now have a chance to propagate their views from decreased barriers to entry.

I believe it wasn't only journalistic gatekeeping that prevented this for so long, but simply a lack of affordance for willing parties to do those things. High-speed Internet has made everything so much easier.

My feelings about the rise of streaming video are also conflicted. It has given us high-quality longform content on topics that hadn't been covered before, but all those other people's passions and hobbies take up way too much time if you as a consumer become deeply invested in them (not even counting the conspiracy genre and its implications). It's easy to do partially because YouTube facilitates that, but I think in the end people want to consume all this information in the end, for some definition of "want". And dozens of 6-hour streams of the latest game or another will keep being uploaded every day.

And there's this other thing that I keep coming back to. Someone I know was really into this engineer creating fake Apple product boxes that recorded thieves stealing them and being glitterbombed. They found it hilarious, but I was sort of confounded. It was the conversion of a few people's bad choices into entertainment and ad revenue, coated over with the intellectual sheen of detailed makerspace engineering diagrams and wit mixed with a moral high ground. Though what the thieves did was not right, there was something smug and passive aggressive about the entire thing that rubbed me the wrong way. And this was presented as just a humble guy with engineering experience creating his content and getting people interested in STEM. Anyone has the capability to do this sort of thing now, not just a media machine with questionable motives. It's just regular, driven people with questionable motives now.

[herval]

I think what you're describing ("the long tail") has been a phenomenon for a decade or so - tons of youtubers, tons of bloggers, tons of twitter personalities, etc. I see it as a good thing, people definitely want to consume it.

What's been bothering is the layers of skimmers that are dominating all those mediums - the top youtube channels now are repeaters, the top tiktok channels are fake accounts copying the content, there's layers of "reactors" (they call themselves that) that add absolutely no value, but polute the whole timeline, and so on. This is mostly a newer phenomenon - as if the internet is quickly turning into a multimedia version of the mail system - it'll snuff out actual creativity/usefulness and slowly decay into spam spam spam spam.