Where Have All the Websites Gone?

The rest of us, posters, amplifiers, and aggregators, traded our discovery autonomy for a chance at fame and fortune. Not all, but enough to change the social web landscape.

But that gold at the end of the rainbow isn't for us. "Creator funds" pull from a fixed pot. It's a line item in a budget that doesn't change, whether one hundred or one million hands dip inside it. Executives in polished cement floor offices, who you'll never meet, choose their winners and losers.

For better or worse, the web doesn't work like that anymore. No one clicks a webpage hoping to learn which cat can haz cheeseburger. Weirdos, maybe. Sickos.

No, we get our content from a For You Page now— algorithmically selected videos and images made by our favorite creators, produced explicitly for our preferred platform. Which platform doesn't matter much. So long as it's one of the big five. Creators churn out content for all of them.