Isn’t that exactly the point of the meme? Internet 20 years ago was about sharing mostly. Internet today is about monetization mostly. And content quality isn’t what makes you big, it’s your ability to game/abuse the system
The point of the meme is “How dare creators expect any sort of compensation for their work!? No ads! No subscriptions! Give it to us for the ‘exposure’!”
I don’t think most people have an issue with compensation for good content, it’s just there are not a lot of monetization schemes that support this. So what you get instead of quality content is stuff like 40 minute video tutorials with 5 ad breaks about a subject that could have been explained in 5 minutes. That’s also why people tend to put reddit at the end of a google search because chances are good you find a simple post with the exact information you need instead of all the blog sites that explain the same shit in only 5003937352729 words with 300 ads inbetween that show up at the first result page because they game the seo system.
I’m very aware of the problems with weak-effort content on the Internet, and if the first half wasn’t “Cool guy pays to give away content for free”, yeah, that might be it. It’s pretty clearly not OPs intent, though.
The system is far from perfect, but that people can now subsidize their income or replace it entirely with content creation is not a bad thing. People deserve to be compensated for their work, whether that work is for a corporation or for an audience of fans.
