[agumonkey]

I don't know if it's been documented or studied, but it seems the availability argument is a fallacy. It just open the floodgates and you get 90% of small effort attempts and not much more. The old world where the barrier was higher guaranteed that only interesting things would happen.

[scelerat]

It seems there's some kind of corollary to what you're saying to when (in the US) we went from three major television networks to many cable networks or, later, when streaming video platforms began to proliferate and take hold -- YouTube, Netflix, etc.: The barriers to entry dropped for creators, and the market fragmented. There is still quality creative content out there, some it as good as or better than ever. But finding it, and finding people to share the experience of watching it with you is harder.

Same could be said of traditional desktop software development and the advent of web apps I suppose.

I guess I'm not that worried, other than being worried about personally finding myself in a technological or cultural eddy.

[dgb23]

Trivially, fewer interesting things happen if the barrier is incidental to some degree.

I think the more pressing issues are costs: opportunity cost, sunk cost, signal to noise ratio.