It was new and exciting, you discovered all the interesting stuff you could do with it.

Before the internet, you only compared yourself to your friends in terms of skill, it fostered healthy competition that drove your skills to be better.

Then came the internet, and it was great, specialist forums showed up, with roughly a few hundred members, may be a few thousand members for the really big ones, these were still small communities and you still could compete with your skill in a friendly manner.

Then came the big generic social media sites, and they were great, you could talk to anyone, share experiences with a truly gigantic audience and browse a never ending stream of content.

Then the big generic social media sites stayed, and their members created groups about the same thing that they used to go to specialist forums for a few years earlier. Why would you go to a specialist forum when you had a social media group available with just one click?

Then the admins of the old forums saw that users left the forums, and after a while with few updates and fewer new users, they saw that it wasn't worth it anymore, and closed the doors.

Over at the social media group, user's no longer competed with their skill against a small group of their peers, but against a truly gigantic group with people many, many times better than themselves, this have and will continue to kill enthusiasm for their work.

Then a switch flipped in the social media sites, content is no longer sorted by timelines or likes, but what drives engagement, still this seemed fine, as people obviously enjoyed engaging content, but trouble was brewing....

Members soon learned that they could game the system, the social media sites all uses a complex system to determine the best way to display content for maximum engagement, and members learned what made the system promote their content.

Somewhere along the line, sponsors came in, and started paying for ads in the content, then they started demanding that the rest of the content outside of their ads also conform to their standards, this made the content even more generic and formulaic, few content creators dared to be too different.

This is about where we are now, everybody is talking, but few are saying something.