For me the difference today is that most people sharing their passions are now doing for The Algorithm. It's a far cry from the scrappy days of the early web where people just posted stuff because they thought it was cool. I'm not saying their passion is any less, more just that is so much noise. People are now "creators" and are pressured to constantly create.

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ndriscoll a day ago | parent [-]

Don't go on sites with "creators" then. When people say this they're talking about like 5 websites. They're not "the Internet" at all.

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TFNA 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why do you assume a hobby or interest still has a significant presence on the non-algorithmified open web?

For travel-related hobbies, for instance, there is no longer any kind of significant open-web scene where people just share stuff to help others or because it is cool. (Yes, you can set up your own blog, but pretty much none of your peers will ever see it.) The community might be using a variety of apps beyond your "like 5 websites", but all those apps are designed around phones and minimize text content, and so they are just as pathological as "sites with 'creators'".

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ndriscoll 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not sure what exactly a travel-related hobby app might even be for (other than e.g. a map and a calendar, but there are FOSS ones), but isn't this exactly demonstrating the "creator" mentality? You can make your blog as you like it with text, images, videos, etc. Share it with people in your social circle who are interested. Maybe others will find it too some day if you want it to be open. But if you can't send them a link, they're not really your peer, are they? And if they won't click a link, they weren't interested.

	▲	TFNA 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Let me give you long-haul bicycle travel as an example: back when there was an active blogging scene, people sharing route tips and bike-build breakdowns could be sure that a decent amount of other people would find it and benefit from it: the blogs got picked up by search engines and were readily findable, and there was still a culture of using the open web. Today, no one you will see the content that you posted to help other people out. Google began deprioritizing personal blogs a decade ago already, and now a whole generation has come up that doesn't know the open web is a thing. When people look for tips in this hobby, it is overwhelmingly on phone apps like Komoot or PolarSteps, on the general image-based social media like YouTube or Instagram, or (already for an older-skewing crowd that still uses browsers) on the big for-profit website Bikepacking.com that grew by using its SEO-fu to wipe out the non-profit-driven scene. There is a community around this hobby, one with a lot of IRL interaction, and people do enjoy that feeling of community. But claiming that people "aren't really your peer" if they don't use the old open web that we knew, is just cutting yourself off from that.

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sodapopcan 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ha, yes I wanted to keep my comment short without trying to cover every base, but figured I might get this comment. Of course such sites still exist, but still a different phenomena when that was the entire internet. There are a lot of interesting people who run YouTube channels that be so cool to see a GeoCities-type site from, for example.