How the Creator Economy Destroyed the Internet
theverge.com
theverge.com
Let's put the blame where it belongs. Monopolistic companies destroyed the internet.
> This is the media ecosystem we live in now — a supercharged shopping system that thrives on outrage, dominates the culture, and resists any real scrutiny because no one’s really in charge
That's the media ecosystem you've lived in your entire life. The internet, as always, just scaled up what we already had.
It's been done before, time to revamp for a new generation.
This is also true for more than just the internet.
I don’t know if the current media environment is better than what we had then, but it’s pretty foolish to think that it’s automatically worse based on US foreign policy going back the last 50 years alone.
Sure, but how are we supposed to disentangle this change from the concurrent growth of algorithmic feeds driving what people see? I have no doubt that democratization of communication would have social effects on its own, but we don't really know what those would be sans the simultaneous centralizing effect that dominant social media companies impose.
It was even easier before genAI and NLP where you could reliably say they're not really putting forward precise variants of genres because there just wasn't the capability of distinguishing (and still to this day I think they'd have trouble) genuine vs bait versions of videos. I think people want to believe the algorithm is more manipulated than it is generally because it serves a bunch of junk and it's more appealing to believe it's being pushed rather than that's just what people consume a lot of.
For a completely anecdotal bit of anecdata I've had good luck over the years with stuff like the Youtube algorithm because I've been fairly judicious with the "don't show me this" button(s) and I habitually watch stuff I know is pure junk food in an incognito window instead of on my 'main' feed.
i.e. selecting for what people linger on rather than what they click for instance. People might stare at a car crash in passing but that isn't exactly the same as what they want but algorithm design choices means that it reflects that as a genuine want. And the resulting feedback loop means more people start doing car crash content and ultimately over time narrows what is produced
We had local newspapers, weeklies, and magazines, with local owners and editors, printing at local print shops, subsidized by local advertisers, dropped in boxes and stacked at local community hubs by local kids. Same for local radio stations and local television networks, although these had such high capital and regulation requirements that many of them were already being soaked up into larger networks more quickly.
As the online stuff emerged, we had local BBS's, and local forums and websites and blogs operated by local people, made known through the above local media channels or just through word of mouth.
Writers and editors and artists and merchants would be real people that circulated in the community, who would encounter readers/viewers/consumers face to face. Earnest small businesses that served a niche in the community could call up and get a reasonable price for an ad slot or classified listing without always having to bid in an auction against against an national brand with an effectively unlimited budget.
The last 10-20 years of the Internet, of social media and consolidation and the "Creator Economy", didn't just "scale up what we already had" -- it scaled up one small thing that we already had and displaced more or less everything else.
Are there any moves afoot to adjust laws to make "marketplace" websites liable for the actions of sellers?
Illegitimate knockoffs would be less of an issue if you had to go to independent websites to find them.
There's tons of counterfeit stuff on Amazon. I'm at the point now where I avoid Amazon because the last five things I bought there were all counterfeit and the products were not limited to one industry. They were across areas you wouldn't think you'd counterfeit stuff.
- a "Premium Brands" toggle, that seemingly filters down to just a hand-curated list of known brands per category
- a "Top Brands" toggle, that seemingly applies some heuristic to filter out listings by companies that haven't accrued enough aggregate "experience points" (some formula like "product-listing-age times product rating", per listing?) across all their listings. Which makes it actively counterproductive to create a new random six-letter fly-by-night brand for each listing, while still allowing new brands to organically "grow into" relevance.
And they also need to cut it out with the comingled inventory from the new guys!
For example, there's a (Shenzhen-based, but well-established in the US market) 3D printer vendor called "Elegoo." Their name was (apparently...) chosen as an abbreviation of "Electronics with a Googol applications." Does your filter block them?
> They simply use Popflex’s copyrighted images without permission, sometimes editing the color of the skort in the photo to fit the listing. In May 2025 alone, Popflex counted 461 listings it believes infringe on its Pirouette Skort design patent, but it’s still a drop in the bucket of the thousands that Ho has encountered just by doing reverse image searches.
It's like somebody set out to do what the 90s Geocities couldn't, using modern tech.
This is garish: https://yvettesbridalformal.p1r8.net/
This style is basically a sort of nostalgiacore and that's exactly what it's trying to do. It's heavily influenced by Web 1.0 and the time-smear of 1990s-2000s early Web culture.
July https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/709635/knock-it-off (https://archive.ph/Y0dvZ)
Nov https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/804409/perez-hilton-liv... (https://archive.ph/fuXL4)
Nov https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/818380/college-students... (https://archive.ph/Edc6G)
Dec https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/836456/influencers-tikt... (https://archive.ph/Atrlc)
Also, that's rich coming The Verge/Vox. Pot, meet Kettle.