Normification is a facet of our undemocratic capitalism. As you see yourself as a consumer of the internet and not a citizen, you mostly assume that a thing being
- popular
- monetizable
- and convenient
is always preferable.
So the internet continues to have a huge potential to host many cool places, but
- they can’t reach users that might be interested
- gaining support from small donations is difficult
- and they can’t integrate a complete set of features, accessibility, design and content moderation.
If you ask an average internet user about these places, it’s a common response to say they’re weird as in not normal. If you dig a bit for what they mean, it’s usually the above. Nobody is there, it can’t make money and it doesn’t have all the things.
Old news? Seems to be a subject of several papers for some time now. Synthetic data has been used successfully already for very specific domains.