> In between these two swings of the pendulum we had periods of diverse, distributed, innovation. Remember the browser wars? Web 2.0?
You're "remembering" a pendulum that did not ever exist. The online services like AOL became web portals like...AOL and really only died out as social media sites like MySpace and later Facebook replaced them for the "average" user. There was no magical utopian era where Web 2.0 darlings dominated either in terms of users or raw traffic over portals or social media sites.
The non-existent pendulum isn't swinging the other day. Outside of a few niches blogging is a ridiculous amount of SEO spam and content farms. While some podcasts seem to do well I sure come across a lot of dead ones. It certainly looks like a lot of "podcasts" are moving to YouTube and the like for better monetization if they didn't just start as a YouTube channel.
Maybe blogs and podcasts will somehow find a way to thrive but right now it looks like they're just trying to game algorithms rather than make good content. Since that's how they get paid I can't exactly fault bloggers or podcasters for doing it but it's far from the Platonic ideal of either medium.
You're conflating producing content with getting paid. I remember a time when you could find blogs that were actually interesting, and people banded together to form communities, and no one was getting paid for it. The problem here is that, thanks to Twitter, YouTube, et. al., everyone has a megaphone now, and it's just almost impossible to find the good stuff in all the dreck now. And anyone who rises to a level of notice on one of these "platforms" starts putting their good stuff behind paywalls these days.
You're "remembering" a pendulum that did not ever exist. The online services like AOL became web portals like...AOL and really only died out as social media sites like MySpace and later Facebook replaced them for the "average" user. There was no magical utopian era where Web 2.0 darlings dominated either in terms of users or raw traffic over portals or social media sites.
The non-existent pendulum isn't swinging the other day. Outside of a few niches blogging is a ridiculous amount of SEO spam and content farms. While some podcasts seem to do well I sure come across a lot of dead ones. It certainly looks like a lot of "podcasts" are moving to YouTube and the like for better monetization if they didn't just start as a YouTube channel.
Maybe blogs and podcasts will somehow find a way to thrive but right now it looks like they're just trying to game algorithms rather than make good content. Since that's how they get paid I can't exactly fault bloggers or podcasters for doing it but it's far from the Platonic ideal of either medium.