I can't believe 'There's no good content anymore.' There are more people; there's more connectivity; there are more digital cameras.
IMHO, the thing that changed was the signal:noise ratio.
When Google started, it was, what? 1:10? 1:100? Interesting pages : crap.
Now it's... 1:10,000? 1:1,000,000?
That turns a challenging problem into a possibly impossible one.
Granted, Google bears culpability in this, because at some point they realized: we can make as much or more money if we optimize for ad delivery than user search intent. And once they showed those cards with a wink, content optimized to this for its own monetization.
A certain amount of people probably would have taken the time to learn how to do something like host a web page on shared hosting or even github pages, but don't because it's both easier to upload to a platform, and you get infinitely more reach - sometimes facilitated by the platform (e.g. TikTok often promotes <10 view videos to gauge them, and will skyrocket a post from an otherwise new account if enough viewers interact with the video).
However, if these platforms exist, there's no telling how many multitudes more people wouldn't even attempt to put stuff online. Life is busy and spending even an hour setting up an online presence on the "open web" is too much for most people.
Yep. Most of the non-developers probably couldn't set up a HTML page. And the developers can also be too busy.
Many years ago, I wrote my own homepage in PHP. With every version of PHP it needed to be fixed again, so after a few years I gave up. I tried to install some existing software, but you need to update that regularly, too often. So now I am happy that there is Substack I can write on (despite complaining about its functionality all the time), because otherwise I wouldn't have a blog.
This is a feedback loop though. It is a reflection of the moderation wars in some ways: Google’s main job now is to try to keep you away from malicious sites as much as find good ones.
So they prioritize ‘known good’ sites (big platforms, major companies, etc.) over unknown, individual sites. Then, since it’s now harder to be seen as your individual site (and less work), this pushes people to move to higher ranked platforms. This increases the ratio of noise (the ratio of spam/malicious sites increases compared to good ones) making it worthwhile to skew more towards results from platforms, etc.
Platforms also have the benefit in that it’s a lot harder for a YouTube video to be malicious, giving them more freedom to take chances recommending unknown content. It still could be hate mail, but at least it’s not going to ransomware you.
I kind of hope some walled gardens pop up and close off other parts of the internet.
I still reflect when I go back on tours of 70s / 80s / 90s media, and while I get some of the "oldies tour" is also kind of a "greatest hits" effect, but there seemed to be a lot more creativity, especially wacky creativity, in the past.
Some of that is callous mass market media calculations by "big media": multi-hundred million dollar movies/games aren't going to be off the beaten path.
What is strange is the ARMIES of "content producers" and all they do is produce things in basically the same way.
So the "SEO" optimization seems to clip the wings of all grassroots content production. Google should have enabled the long tail. It ... sort of ... has, but man its hard to find it drowned out by all the mediocre crap out there.
People don't seem to be isolated from the internet and let some path of creativity percolate for years or even decades like what used to happen. Internet monoculture really seems to be destroying interesting creativity more than it delivers novel creativity from around the world.
"Comorbidity" with this is the death of patience and attention for wacky stuff, people click away too quickly.
About the only actual evidence I can deliver is the oppressive nature of the cinema sequel. For some reason, I just mark the first Matrix movie (1999) as the death of creativity in Hollywood.
However, of course, that may be the point in the 18-40 demo that I aged out of the great popular culture recycling machine. I think a lot of that 18-40 demographic number comes from the fact that by the time you hit 40, you've seen all the tricks, and the repackaging of the tricks/tropes just seems cheap compared to the "original" experience you had with the trick/trope.
I also noticed that starting about 3-6 months ago, most of the things I Google have actual results for maybe the first 1.5 pages, and the rest are websites with URL’s like poltgabdismrvdusvetw.xyz with an obviously scraped/gpt description that will try to get you to give their latest cryptominer or cryptolocker a try. The ones that claim you have a virus, or worse - try to get you to buy McAfee.
oh, do you have an example for a search phrase? What I see is that google images results are pretty bad: stocks/pinterest first and just a couple of pages of the results (even for searches that should return millions of matches).
It's just more consolidated into hubs that are locked down in comparison to the earlier version. It was like 100,000 countries all with their own language and culture and people's and now it's like a handful of huge countries and a few smaller but the dropoff is quick. We organized the Internet the way we organized the world. Some Conways law thing going on I guess.
The content creators got robbed of any of their value. Reddit, Facebook etc all sucked up and monetized the content and gave creators nothing in return except a bit of limited exposure.
One issue for me (maybe it's my ADHD) is that there is almost TOO much content. I can't decide what to read. I have so many tabs of blog posts and such that look interesting that I never get around to. There is plenty of interesting content. More than ever before.
Until youtube or google’s algo decides to kill your chanel without much recourse or get nearly 0 visits because the algo expects some kind of engaging formula. These abuses are enough to warrant not ‘posting content’ (I highly dislike this term) on their platforms at all.
But at the same time I understand that a large number of people choose convenience over managing their own hosting.
Youtube is different from the web. You can't just be informative you have to be informative and entertaining.
There are lots of channels that manage that, sometimes it's fun to watch a knowledgable person explain something or review a product purely out of entertainment even if you will never buy it.
If people are informative an audience will find them, if they're entertaining and audience will subscribe to them.
Whatever downsides youtube has for a creator is vastly outmatched by the upsides for most creators.
I would still speculate that the content that gets published will depend on the environment it's being published in.
A smaller, tighter knit community will encourage the sharing of more intimate details. If, however, all the action is happening on larger stages that pull people's attention out of the phpbb's and into the tiktok reels, those conversations no longer happen, even if the volume of communication has increased 1000fold
IMHO, the thing that changed was the signal:noise ratio.
When Google started, it was, what? 1:10? 1:100? Interesting pages : crap.
Now it's... 1:10,000? 1:1,000,000?
That turns a challenging problem into a possibly impossible one.
Granted, Google bears culpability in this, because at some point they realized: we can make as much or more money if we optimize for ad delivery than user search intent. And once they showed those cards with a wink, content optimized to this for its own monetization.
FFS, look at National Geographic these days: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/