Don’t want to date myself, but finding new sites and communities used to be fun.
Are there any cool sites anymore? Besides this one, of course?
Don’t want to date myself, but finding new sites and communities used to be fun.
Are there any cool sites anymore? Besides this one, of course?
My take is that patreon and crowdfunded projects caused everyone with creative skill that used to just make shit and put it on the web for free to instead chase whatever they can get money for.
Even videogame modding has taken a turn for the worse as a result of this, with simple mods gated behind patreon or other platforms that would always have been free previously.
What used to be a maker culture of everyone doing shit and releasing shit became a grifter culture of everyone chasing various passive incomes for various projects they only initially put time and effort into that is all collected through patreon donors that have long forgotten their donation is still running.
Capital realised people were making stuff for free and it moved in to create a model where those people making stuff for free could be convinced to gate it for payments. The tinkerer culture of the internet died because of it.
Or the android store where people have the gall to make, for example, a sudoku app with fucking ads and subscriptions. You aren’t making anything new! There are 5,000 free open source implementations of sudoku on the computer, but put it on the android store and suddenly it absolutely must be monetized
all my mods are free because i don’t want a cease and desist, but i’m not going to say what games or where i upload because opsec.
I don’t completely blame creators for this now, though. Life is way more expensive than it used to be, simply to live. Not to mention there are a lot less jobs (anyone who’s been doing the job search thing on hexbear can tell you that). Food prices, rent, etc cost a lot of money and it takes a lot of time. Some people like Hakim have other real jobs, but it means they have less time to edit videos so they have to hire editors.
Capitalism has forced people to monetize their hobbies just to have either the money or time to live.
I think it really began with app stores.
The Apple and Google stores encouraged people to sell simple little pieces of software that did things like turn on your phone’s flash to use as a flashlight for 99 cents. And if someone can make a dollar for something simple like that the thinking goes, why shouldn’t you “hustle” and have a “side-gig” taking your passion projects and monetizing them for a buck or two as well. Of course it took years from the introduction of such things to the ecosystem of charging people for computer software to develop, half a decade easily but it arrived and along with it came a swarm of youtube slop and articles and the like telling people about “hacks” to make money on the side, linkedin-maniacs coming out of the woodwork to tell people they were suckers if they weren’t charging money for their tiny passion project, dangling unrealistic notions under clickbait titles like “I make $10,000/month just from my side projects”.
And that got osmotically absorbed and repeated until it became the wisdom. Along with that the industry matured. The learn2code thing came along and diluted salaries and decreased demand, suddenly you had software devs newly minted from university who weren’t getting jobs or at least not the jobs they’d been promised with the pay they wanted and so they believed these capitalist scammers when they sold them this as a way to bridge the gap between expectations and reality.
Stuff like this is why I’m not that optimistic about Linux and open source. Those flourished because there wasn’t an easy, one-click way to monetize things, because in those days software engineers pulled down decent/high 6 figure salaries and on top of that were given leave by companies to invest in themselves and make passion projects instead of working at times. That plus the early internet/computing anarcho-hacker ethos led to this flourishing of open source and free stuff and now I fear it’s on the decline for the future. Until socialism arrives at least. Once the old heads pass, you have younger generations who grew up with these things normalized, with in-app purchases normalized, with paid game loot-boxes and sparkle armor normalized, with app stores normalized, with patreons normalized.
Capitalism has taught people that everything should be monetized.