[btbuildem]

"People only care about consuming" -- it might seem that way to a lazy beholder. The entire digital landscape is engineered for consumption -- of ads, and the products they advertise.

Yet individuals continue to CREATE content on which these parasites piggy-back. We are creatives by nature. The consumption is just one facet; had we built "the internet" out of tools and spaces more suitable for creativity, perhaps this would be more reflected in the general trends. Even now, you can't stem the tide of silly, interesting, creative things people post in these narrow, controlled channels.

[dfxm12]

Interesting that you left off the qualifier "many", changing the context of OP's statement.

I'll say, talking about "many" in the pool of all Internet users is pretty much meaningless (you can count "many" among any sub-population from a starting population so large), but OP is clearly implying that there are a great deal more consumers than creators out there.

Stats support this, like 97% of tweets coming from only 25% of tweeters: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...

[deltarholamda]

Exactly this. The sort of person who kept a personal Web site in the 90s and 00s is the sort of person who keeps a personal journal. Back then it was a fairly significant outlay of cash (domain name, hosting, etc.) Right around the time these things got significantly cheaper, it also ran up against the competition from siloed services (Twitter, Facebook).

It takes a certain type of person to keep up a personal site that is largely disconnected from a wider audience. The people posting memes, quips and barbs on social media aren't "creative" per se. They're engaging in the dopamine drip machine of social media.

Technical people are more used to this kind of thing, as they are almost forced to delegate their cognitive load onto some sort of medium that they can access so they don't have to remember how to set up load balancing in Docker or whatever.