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Comment by phailhaus | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. You can still do that, but you're not going to be able to do it full time, so the quantity and quality is far lower.

EDIT: Far lower on average, of course. Please don't fixate on pedantry. The point is self-evident and still stands. Quality and quantity is correlated with the amount of time you can spend on it.

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> quantity and quality is far lower.

Hard disagree with this conclusion. Doing something full time does not mean that it will be high quality nor high quantity. Nor does not doing something full time mean that someone will not produce high quality in high quanity. Lots of great things are the product of people doing things in their free time.

Hard disagree with your hard disagree. Any skill benefits from dedicating yourself to it full time. Yes, there are talented amateurs, but they're on the tail of the distribution. There is a selection bias because you don't tend to see all the mediocre work produced by untalented amateurs.

Who is likely to be the better piano player, the accountant practicing 5 hours a week, or the concert pianist practicing 30 hours a week?

Keep in mind we're talking about the Internet. It's very easy to find the tail of the distribution on the Internet.

The quality of the old Internet was higher on average. There is a lot of awesome content today, but they are hard to find amid an ocean of SEO, clickbait, social media and other random garbage content. The old Internet was a collection of passion projects, so you saw a lot of quality information exactly because people weren't being paid to produce it - they simply loved to do it.

> but you're not going to be able to do it full time, so the quantity and quality is far lower.

This is totally a market-driven perspective, expecting quantity and quality linked to full-time work.

Not everyone aims to monetize or dedicate themselves full-time to their online interests. Pursuits can be purely for enjoyment. It's okay if they suck sometimes. Not everything must cater to consumer or market demands, though that approach is valid too.

And that's literally still allowed today.

Quantity maybe, quality? Doubtful.

A lot of hobby projects end up being way better than corporate stuff because they're made with passion instead of by cynical grifters trying to squeeze every cent of ad revenue out of users. Compare something like the nearly entirely ad-free UESP Wiki[0] to the ad-laden dogshit Elder Scrolls Fandom[1], which would be even worse had it not just scraped info from the UESP Wiki.

One is a labor of love, the other is a labor of SEO specialists monetizing your eyeballs the best they can, and it shows.

[0] https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page [1] https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki

It's really not debatable, because you're still allowed to make hobbyist projects today. Nobody is stopping you! The nature of the internet today is a superset of the old internet.

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