Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

The whole Internet hat peaked due to monetization. Very little content is created because somebody is passionate about something and wants to share. Almost all content is created to either directly make money or to collect enough followers to eventually start making money. Everything is fake and optimized to grab attention. What organic content remains is drowned out by the firehose of monetized content.

View on HN

Everyone saying the Internet is money-driven is correct, but this is not unique to the Internet. It is also true for TV and movies. And for magazines and other publications. And radio.

There are exceptions in every type of media where some people are still putting out content for reasons other than money. The key difference to the Internet is that the cost of content creation remains low. That isn't true of TV, Movies, or radio.

So rather than just saying "It has peaked", I encourage people to take action - put out good content, stop looking at bad content, and stop making the first question when people create something online, "How are you going to monetize this?"

My youtube feed is heavily curated. Every once in a while Youtube tries to slip in some of those monetization channels (e.g. reaction videos, videos recycling snippets from films,...). Also, once in a while, I start exploring, trying to find some new stuff that inteigues me. This seems to kick the algorithm into over drive... It's two weeks now that I kick out channels and content after I watched some Goodwood Racing clips and stupid me clicked on one or two of youtubes recommendations below those...

I wonder if there's any service/search engine that could help find authentic, non-monetized content? Ideally results would be filtered out if they had any ads at all or affiliate links anywhere on the domain. Perhaps it'd also be valuable to exclude analytics platforms?

I feel like a decade ago discoverability of those little corners of the internet where someone is passionate about something and writes a blog about it was better. Trying to search for reviews has always been tough, but it's impossible to find anything that's not monetized to the hell and back for something like "best tent for camping" or "tent reviews 2022".

The closest I've found is millionshort.com, which does have some nice filters (e.g. "remove sites with live chat"), but that still doesn't quite get there.

https://millionshort.com/search?keywords=Best%20tent%202022&...

To be fair, even a passion project will use analytics because it’s nice to know one doesn’t produce passionately for the void.

What's the problem with the drive for monetization? Out in the physical world you also rarely get services and content for free. Also monetization here mostly means possibilites for donation and paying for extra content, usually most of a creator's content is still free. As for money-grabber content: a good platform should have an efficient and honest rating mechanism.

When I first started using the Internet it was like going to a pub and striking up a conversation with a stranger about a topic of mutual interest, or going to the park and watching people do things they enjoy. There was no competition to maximize my engagement in order to have me watch ads that create desires for things that I don't need. It was just some dudes who really liked talking about crop circles or model trains or semiconductors. Imo it's the difference between doing things in order to make money and making money in order to do things.

>What's the problem with the drive for monetization? Out in the physical world you also rarely get services and content for free.

It's just as screwed up in the real world, the difference is that the internet at least temporarily offered an escape hatch to our screwed up economic system because at least the same logic of scarcity didn't apply. Now we've bolted the same crap on top of our digital lives.

At some point we will have to start building a "second internet" that is governed through a network of trust rather than through an economy of attention grabbing.

Wasn't there a a push for micropayments at some point? I think advertisements won out by being more accessible. It is hard to say if the internet would be better or not with micropayments instead of ads.

Then there is a tiktok, which I refuse to install because it's massive spyware AND until you build enough data for the algorithm it's all just inapropriately dancing kids

More content is created because somebody is passionate and wants to share than ever before. There is a tremendous amount of monetized content, sure, so perhaps the ratio of passion content to monetized content is lower today. But instagram and tiktok have made the barrier for content creation basically zero and mountains and mountains of content by people who are just having fun is created daily.

That's why many people have migrated to discord communities or private forums. For me they are the only "places" left to find some human discussion that is not directly trying to sell you something

> What organic content remains is drowned out by the firehose of monetized content.

When r/gonewild (NSFW!) is about the only source of genuinely non-monetized content on the Internet remaining... sigh

Or all the growth and actual engagement is going to TikTok

Reply on news.ycombinator.com