[nirimda]

> Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming.

Strong disagree. People want to participate, they want to be part of a conversation. When you "consume" content on Facebook or Twitter, you can produce content and reasonably expect to get an audience - because you know there's other people there.

If you have your own personal website, you have no natural audience. If you're lucky, Google might like it and return it. But chances are, it won't thanks to SEO. And even if you do, you don't have any replies. A voice shouting into a void, signifying nothing. At that point, you need a blogging engine that allows for replies, and now you're in the world of off-the-shelf solutions. Not so far from Facebook or MySpace, which gets you your audience.

[mym1990]

People want to mindlessly scroll, a very low energy form of participation. At the end of the day, a very very small percentage of the users are creating content on a regular basis. You can't ignore the things that you give up by opting into a mass scale product, privacy, security, etc...

With a personal website, everything does become harder, but it ends up being your space and only your space. We've become accustomed to going viral and now no one can settle for having 50 consistent readers because that just seems so insignificant.

[mikae1]

> People want to mindlessly scroll, a very low energy form of participation.

If you ask 1000 people that have been mindlessly scrolling for the past 3 hours if they wish they'd done something else, I'm guessing most of them would say yes.

[_aavaa_]

And yet they scrolled, and not for lack of other options

[deafpolygon]

The reason for that is one of my favorite words: Inertia.

[mikae1]

So, what is your explanation?

[dimkorf]

> People want to participate, they want to be part of a conversation.

Are you potentially speaking for a vocal minority here that wants to be part of a conversation while ignoring the many than simply read (consume)?

[adql]

Well, there is a reason most sites nowadays have comment section. The readers also read comments, even if they might only add to them rarely

[mattarm]

Leaving comments is a different kind of participation than curating a personal website. The assertion originally under discussion here (a few posts back) is that most people don't care to curate their own personal website, or, really, any sort of distinguished online identity. I think that is true. Most people are on Facebook/Instagram/Nextdoor/whatever are doom scrolling it, not trying to become an influencer. The assortment of people leaving comments on NYT, Amazon reviews, or chattering on a forum somewhere, or whatever else, are doing just that, but not trying to drive traffic to their personal home page.

[sharemywin]

I don't think people do one thing. sometimes the read sometimes they like and sometimes they comment.

[amendegree]

Back when there was a lot of push back against a certain CEO redditors didn't like, that CEO noted that the ratio of commenters:viewers was like 1:1000. I personally know many people who created reddit accounts only because they were forced to by the app, but still have never posted a comment or even upvoted something (intentionally).

[michaelbrave]

I think it's closer to "people are willing to sacrifice some culture for convenience, until it destroys all the culture"

I think we are reaching the point where it's been hollowed out enough that there is finally showing some pushback against it, many asking if the convenience or access to audience is still worth the cultural sacrifices we give for it.

That said the demographics of most things are ballpark <10% produce content, <20% interact with content or comment and the rest >70% just consume content, and this seems to be roughly true ranging from websites to video games (change interact to multiplayer and produce to things like YouTubers or Bloggers about it)

[fknorangesite]

> People want to participate, they want to be part of a conversation.

No, most of them don't:

> the 1% rule is a general rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

[nirimda]

The page you linked directly contradicts your interpretation:

> The 1% rule is often misunderstood to apply to the Internet in general, but it applies more specifically to any given Internet community. It is for this reason that one can see evidence for the 1% principle on many websites, but aggregated together one can see a different distribution. This latter distribution is still unknown and likely to shift, but various researchers and pundits have speculated on how to characterize the sum total of participation. Research in late 2012 suggested that only 23% of the population (rather than 90 percent) could properly be classified as lurkers, while 17% of the population could be classified as intense contributors of content.[9] Several years prior, results were reported on a sample of students from Chicago where 60 percent of the sample created content in some form.

This sort of "1% rule" claim, and other versions of it made by others who have replied, is not a possible counterargument to my claim. Moreover, behavior isn't the same as desire. It's ridiculous to say that Trump didn't want a second term as president just because he didn't get one, and it's not less ridiculous to say that a person doesn't want to post content on the internet just because they didn't post content on your website.

But more fundamentally it goes nowhere towards the "be part of a conversation" bit. "People want to participate, they want to be part of a conversation" means that, while it is true of people in general, it is truer of people who post content. The people who post content want dialogue, so they're going to post where they can get feedback. They don't want to just speak into a void. The rest of my comment can only have made sense if it was a general truth and its application to those who actually create internet content (even just a small throwaway comment like this).

Your kind of argument simply doesn't explain the death of the private website and the growth of social networks. It also doesn't explain why what grew up is interactive networks, not news aggregators.

[nunez]

I think you are partially right, but I also think that people are willing to participate as long as it's low effort relative to their consumption or the expected value warrants investing more effort (i.e. why many teens want to be influencers).

Adding a heart reaction to an Instagram post is much easier than creating that Instagram post, though Instagram has made this very easy to do as well, which is easier still than creating a YouTube video, which is easier than updating a web page on SquareSpace.

I think this is why Reddit is mostly lurkers.