Is there any evidence that these paths are being cut? Mod communities for video games seem like they are thriving. Look at the sheer array of Minecraft mods, or mods for nearly any popular game on Steam.

Combine this with popular and easy game making software like RPGMaker, or even the ease that someone can set up a basic game on Unity. Beyond this, there are programs like Scratch and Processing that allow for fun and relatively easy computational tinkering.

I doubt the natural paths of curiosity have shrunk, though they may look different. Rather, the number of people using computers has massively increased, and the number of computer "tinkerers" is just a smaller proportion of people of the larger whole.

I am oversimplifying the situation. There are more than 1000 people in the world, everyone can enjoy cat videos. My main point is not that the world is divided into hacked and cat videos lovers. (There are two types of people: those who divide people into two categories and those that don’t :)).

My point is that there is a small percentage of the population who are makers and a large percentage who are consumers. The Internet of 30 years ago was mostly populated by the makers so it felt like everyone was a maker. Now it is much more representative of the real public because the consumers joined. It now feels like it’s mostly consumers because in the world’s population consumers outnumber makers by a large percentage. However, and this is the crux of my point, the absolute number of makers did not go down and in fact went up. You won’t find many makers in your Facebook feed, in relative numbers. But maker communities are bigger, better, easier to find, and easier to join than ever before. Just because consumers have joined the makers does not mean that things are worse. They are better. The rest is nostalgia.