Just to add to this, I wanted to give a small example of creator incentives making the internet worse: RSS. If you have a blog, you can make an RSS feed available. It’s just text, tiny in size, costs almost nothing to serve. But then you realize that people will just read your posts in their feed reader and won’t visit your site. So you stop putting the full text of posts into RSS, and put a link to read the post on your site instead. Voila: decentralized enshittification of the RSS ecosystem, purely by the creators themselves, with no middlemen in sight. We watched it happening.
Just to add to this, I wanted to give a small example of creator incentives making the internet worse: RSS. If you have a blog, you can make an RSS feed available. It’s just text, tiny in size, costs almost nothing to serve. But then you realize that people will just read your posts in their feed reader and won’t visit your site. So you stop putting the full text of posts into RSS, and put a link to read the post on your site instead. Voila: decentralized enshittification of the RSS ecosystem, purely by the creators themselves, with no middlemen in sight. We watched it happening.