The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control
I think of this issue in a much more mundane way all the time. When looking for product reviews, for example, the top results are, in my experience, unusable. A search for espresso machine reviews returns SEO driven results, and even the more genuine-looking results (sorry BusinessInsider, but I don't need your input) seem to exclusively list products which the site manager can get a referral link for. I don't mind the idea of referral links in theory, but what happens to the entry that would be #1 except for not being available on Amazon?I don't know that there was ever a golden age of espresso machine reviews online, but I do think that my trust in the quality of information I find through general searches has dramatically fallen in the last ten years. I imagine there is a Facebook group that might have better perspectives, or 'Coffee Twitter', but neither of those are easy to discover through Google, and multiplying my search area across them all (reddit too, I suppose) gets burdensome quickly.So I'm not sure that the internet of creation has disappeared as much as it may have become hidden. Either within walled gardens or by the professionalization of page rank by SEO pros (against whom Joe's coffee corner cannot hope to compete).Either way, search suggests a much less creative internet than might actually be there.