It’s not all black and white though. People in the 2000’s didn’t know that you can make a living off content creation, but people who have adopted this style usually can and will (or should) turn more effort into creating high quality videos.
“High quality” can come in the form of investing time into research, or creating visual aids that present information clearly. But it also often manifests as flashy title cards, pointless special effects, derivative humor (like frenzied jump cuts to movie clips and memes every few seconds), unnecessarily rambling intros, superfluous wall-to-wall music. I feel like many of these features are borrowed over from classical TV, to give the veneer of a highly produced “professional” product, when democratized internet media’s greatest strength is to actually free us from these conventions.
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.
Nailed it.
Millennials really can’t handle growing up can they.
Close, but 2000s had some very intrusive and malware ridden advertisements. Popups everywhere, aggressive banners, malware and random browser toolbars being installed to your system. Complete wild west of unrestrained advertising. Online ad blocking didn’t start with Ublock Origin, the first tipping point was in the 90s and 2000s, where famously clean and effective search engine Google swooped in to “save us” with their Chrome browser blocking popups by default, and their own concept of ‘ethical ads’, which were mostly unobtrusive and text-based (what happened there?). Which was nice for a while before Google exploited the popularity that bought them to turn into an inescapable ad monster.
before Google exploited the popularity
A classic example of enshittification stage 1 and 2, for those unfamiliar with the term.
In the year 2000, an internet friend gave me FTP credentials to a directory on his domain so I could host images and post them on the forum we were friends on.
He provided this service to all the forum users because we were all like :woah: when he started posting images that weren’t just leeched from another domain.
Eventually he did ask users throw him a few bucks, and then he made a tutorial on how to get your own domain and do it yourself.
Which tells me I’ve been using filezilla for about 2/3 of my life.
I rented a web server with FTP in college, with my own domain that used my real name. I used it to transfer files to and from school computers. My classmates would sometimes forget their USB drives and think they just wasted a whole 3 hour lab session, and I would just quickly create some credentials for them and let them use my server. Everyone thought I was a god lol. These days, services like Google Drive have replaced the need for that (mostly), and everyone just takes it for granted. I think it’s funny that people are starting to see value in FTP again now that services like Google Drive and Discord are restricting the ability to use them for free hosting to post files onto external sites.
