The ideas described in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and Chris Anderson's The Long Tail made the mid-2000s super optimistic about having fewer gatekeepers between those who would create something and those who would enjoy that thing: you no longer needed to convince an agent and publisher and distributor for the funds or approval to publish a book, or release an album, or even distribute a short film or movie, because you could just do those things and see if you could find an audience.

And it worked, because on the internet it became economically feasible to publish for a small audience, and it became economically feasible to aggregate a lot of small creators and small audiences into big content-agnostic platforms for the thing being distributed. And a few of them would make it big, too.

Yes, app stores still funnel the overwhelming majority of the money on the platform to a small handful of developers. But I'd argue that the recent moves towards consolidation and concentration is because the ecosystems have betrayed the democratic, decentralized, nondiscriminatory/content-neutral ideals that we built the user-created Web 2.0 on, and instead of descended into enshittified monetization of the platforms' algorithmic control, SEO-like strategies so that slop isn't filtered out, and our utterly hacked brains that can't resist clickbait and ragebait and hornybait to where it's mostly sorting through slop instead of organically finding the niches we enjoy.

And now instead of traditional gatekeepers, we have tech gatekeepers. It was a fun run, though, from 2005-2015.