I'm not sure if they're building the same kind of future capital and skill sets that we did, but maybe it'll turn out well for them. Especially if there's an explosion in the creative economy.
Still, it's incredibly hard to beat a technology that teaches kids to program as a side effect. Flash and early web raised up a generation of engineers.
That's not how we do things anymore. Now everything is an appliance and the user is cattle as far as the developer is concerned.
It's a kind of gatekeeping behavior - "I suffered through memorizing a bunch of git commands by rote, and now you have to as well."
As you said in your last paragraph, Flash _raised up_ a generation of engineers by _lowering_ the entry barriers to a minimum. TikTok is just a showcase for attw's.
It's just that when we look back we remember the gems but not the river of crap, but when we look at the present we see the river too.
Don't 90% of Youtube videos get less than a thousand views [0]? There are millions of videos on TikTok, I'd imagine the algorithm results in the same 80-20 ish sort of balance.
Yes, there were bad Flash projects. But just like everything else, we remember the good ones.
[0]: https://9to5google.com/2020/08/10/almost-90-of-all-uploaded-...
TikTok is probably teaching vital skills for their futures.
Arguably "content creation" is core to every > middle class job now - you have to get people onboard to get things done. Personally I still think writing is more valuable but perhaps the knowledge creation and sharing (_inside_ companies) of tomorrow will be done by making and watching videos.
I very much do not want to be part of that future, but I recognise it a likely possibility.
Arguably, it's the case today to some degree with company meetings/team meetings/etc. typically recorded for people who couldn't attend live. But it's pretty low bandwidth for most purposes to communicate basic facts in the absence of interaction. I for one rarely listen to recordings of meetings I miss and I assume I'm pretty typical. For many purposes I'd much prefer a 1 page email.
It's like all the how-tos on the Internet that don't really have a visual component but are a video anyway.
From experience as the corporation gets larger communicating and communicating-adjacent activities approach 90-95% of the time. The remainder is doing.
I think there's a future where long tail art can be funded on an artisanal level by patrons, and the network will connect consumers to artists that satisfy their interests.
Are you interested in an alternate history Oregon Trail where an alien invasion forces westward migration? Or perhaps a time travelling Jacques Cousteau serial where the protagonist searches for love across the ages?
Somebody will make something weird that satisfies your interests and you will pay them directly. And it'll be better than canned Star Wars spam. It'll be real, and the creator will know you by name.
ML and automation will bring down the cost of content creation dramatically and make it look and feel more compelling than the studio stuff we get today.
...that you know about. :)
Don't go into creating porn with that mindset, it's not a guarantee you'll make significant money. It's still better than creating advertisement though.
0.1 per cent of those on TikTok, or any other sharecropping platform will be able to extend their online persona into something that makes money.
Only a few make a living out of it
And there's a limit on the amount of tik tok like videos that will get attention, once everybody will start making them
Just the sheer amount of interesting games and videos available on places like NewGrounds and Kongregate was something else. It was kind of crazy how easy it was at the time to get at least some attention to any proof of concept project simply by posting onto said sites.
Something that has definitely gotten much harder over time despite the more advanced tools that are available to hobbyists these days.
I think it was a mix of how easy flash made it to go from some vector art drawn in app, to hooking up some key-frames together with logic for a game etc... But it was also IMO strongly influenced by the internet culture at time, where there was (at least it felt like) a larger audience of people available to try out wacky often no/low-budget things.
I haven't quite seen the same environment emerge on places Itch.IO and to an extent Steam.