I actually don’t think it’s always financial.

I understand better now that by forcing a more complex medium you will inherently attract a consumer who has greater commitment to your content.

A person getting an email isn’t as locked in as a person who is attending a zoom meeting. And a person in a zoom meeting isn’t as locked in as a person forced to physically attend a meeting.

You could make your YouTube channel a blog but now you’ll mostly attract an audience that has a greater chance of getting their attention consumed by something shinier, like another YouTube channel.

Therefore, you will always want to deliver a message through the most complicated medium that still lets you attract a suitable audience. It creates more hooks for people to latch onto.

I look at these things as essentially aesthetic preferences. There's certainly cases where a certain medium is the objectively right one for a task, but there's many others where it really just a matter of taste.

I actually think of them as more than just an aesthetic preference. It is fundamentally about proof of work. Something that will become more and more important as we move into a post AI world.

Every single piece of art, music, game or any other creative piece, has three things to it. One, the actual artifact itself of the music, the art and the game. Second is who is making it. And the third is how much have they put into it.

This last point I think matters a lot. As producing things gets easier and easier, just because almost all of creative art is a popularity contest, things will move towards who has put in most of their hearts / effort into it.

And that is why still I think we will always remember a desktop game such as Stardew Valley but never a web game, no matter how good it is. I mean Roblox has been around for a while and maybe I can tell you one or two games in their entire history, which I even remember.

The same with movies from Netflix which are becoming this data oriented, aesthetically pleasing, easy to watch things, but none of them are worth remembering. Will Netflix and these platforms keep growing and having more and more users? Sure.

But therein lies the conundrum. We will have a lot of everything. We will own none of it and our lives will grow more and more shallow and meaningless.

What web game is as good as Stardew Valley and deserves to be just as remembered? Most web games are crap.

That's just an argument about quality though. In the end it's quality that matters more than the amount of effort expended (which isn't something you can easily quantify or confirm). Technology promises to make things easier allowing for quality that wouldn't have been practical otherwise.

Even when the quality is identical there are times when I can appreciate the effort that went into something just because the creator choose to make something in the most inefficient and painful way possible. That's kind of fun in its own way, but it's the exception, not the norm.

As games, music, and other forms of art get easier to produce and distribute thanks to technology we'll have more to choose from. Having choice will always mean you have a lot of sifting through garbage to find things you like, but technology can make that easier too. I'd rather have an overabundance of options than be forced to select from only a few options because creation/distribution is reserved for a select few due to cost/difficultly

That's a interesting way of thinking of it, but a little limited. For most, the proof of work aspect becomes just another part of the the status competition. I think I'm a little more optimistic about the future.

Also, there's definitely web games (paperclips, kittens) and art in every media that are memorable and excellent to someone. That's kind of the point that I was making; the medium is part of the message, but many things can be presented in different ways, and mostly this doesn't detract from anyone else.

Fundamentally, I reject your model of art; I personally think the actual artifact should be the most important part. Anything else shouldn't even be considered as far as we're able, even though we are mostly status seeking monkeys who pay very close attention to every other monkey's status so as to increase our status.

How does AI democratize visual art? Anyone can pick up a pen and draw. Affording all the expensive hardware to train AI, on the other hand, is limited to a much smaller group of people, unless there's something I'm missing?