LogFAQs > #953296027

As soon as people realize that they can make a living doing something relatively easy, they're going to start trying to do that >_> And most people are going to try follow what works.

It's also the natural evolution of any system. As soon as something starts to get popular, people try to figure out how to monetize it.

Otherwise if you have a lot of attention anyway, it kinda makes sense to also promote a product you have. For instance, I don't necessarily fault authors for talking about their books or including links to them because that's part of their normal work.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

This was almost never an actual thing. There were always costs involved with producing and posting content online (server costs and bandwidth aren't free and never were, no matter what you thought when you were a kid and the Internet was a strange and wonderful place to you), and there were always ways to monetize views to pay those costs. Even "free" sites like GeoCities were built on an ad model.

I think his complaint is more about the users monetizing their own content, not the hosting services monetizing the content posted on their platforms. There's a natural expectation that hosting services have bills. However, it can be jarring to have content creators break into messages from their sponsors which so many do nowadays, in *addition* to their Patreon, other donation sources, and then, on top of all that, other advertisements.

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