| This is a great question. The Internet to me does seem to have settled on an equilibrium level of variety which is quite narrow and perhaps to some degree stagnant, whereas in the past it seemed to represent a universe of more opportunity. This is not dissimilar to how markets can sometimes price in the value of optionality. For example, I remember reading somewhere that the share price of a pharma co which has a wide pool of R&D avenues available for further investment can actually shrink when the co settles on a particular choice, setting its budget and strategy for the next few years on following that single (hopefully) star even though this is a necessary step for latent potential to actually be realised into practical reality. The Internet has collapsed into a tool which serves the functions that are most in demand for the audience, and to some degree it has sacrificed possibility (who pays for that?) for utility. Even the appetites of the masses (who provide the demand for what is most prevalent on the net) for fresh content are perhaps stabilising around particular 'centres of mass'. With large numbers of viewers, patterns and uniformity are now predominating which may have been muted when the internet was a platform for explorers and non-standard viewers. The same thing could have happened with other forms of media, too. For example, movies now seem to increasingly rely on special effects to the extent that I sometimes now find it more of a disappointment than otherwise. Sure, it might be pretty to see whirly colours of space or magic, or fascinating to see buildings and glass facades bursting under shockwaves, or planets colliding, but only for a while - we can move on now. Even literary fiction quite often starts to feel same-y when browsing. Also, it takes more work now for content providers to produce something that can escape from the gravitational field of established content platforms. Newness and optionality has value (ask Black-Scholes), and when it does raise its head, it is quickly mopped up by 'fast followers' with deep pockets. A consequence of this, too, is that the reticence of content providers to share anything new without a pay wall has also increased. Unintuitively, it may be that tides of people and attention associated with a platform's maturity tend to homogenise and flatten the landscape of original thought (even making it harder to find valuable newness). |