How the Creator Economy Destroyed the Internet

https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/810002/influencers-creator-economy-special-series

by ecliptik • 8 months ago

87 38 8 months ago

skybrian• 8 months ago

Warning: flashing images, paywalled

rectang3• 8 months ago

Copycat Pirouette Skorts have been sold on Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, TikTok Shop, DHGate, Temu, Shein, and countless other fly-by-night storefronts that will seemingly disappear as quickly as they popped up.

Are there any moves afoot to adjust laws to make "marketplace" websites liable for the actions of sellers?

Illegitimate knockoffs would be less of an issue if you had to go to independent websites to find them.

burningChrome• 8 months ago

> Illegitimate knockoffs would be less of an issue if you had to go to independent websites to find them.

There's tons of counterfeit stuff on Amazon. I'm at the point now where I avoid Amazon because the last five things I bought there were all counterfeit and the products were not limited to one industry. They were across areas you wouldn't think you'd counterfeit stuff.

derefr2• 8 months ago

Apparently Amazon is starting to do something about this. They've recently introduced two filtering toggles:

- a "Premium Brands" toggle, that seemingly filters down to just a hand-curated list of known brands per category

- a "Top Brands" toggle, that seemingly applies some heuristic to filter out listings by companies that haven't accrued enough aggregate "experience points" (some formula like "product-listing-age times product rating", per listing?) across all their listings. Which makes it actively counterproductive to create a new random six-letter fly-by-night brand for each listing, while still allowing new brands to organically "grow into" relevance.

stackskipton• 8 months ago

I mean, the law already holds shops accountable, but problem is regulators let Amazon get away with "We are a marketplace" despite them actually selling stuff as first party and allowing third parties use their logistics and warehouses.

rectang3• 8 months ago

The "marketplace" loophole which allows a few dominant websites to insulate themselves from consequences for illegitimate sales is at the root of the consolidation decried in the top-level article.

rtkwe3• 8 months ago

I'm not sure there's a way to do that, there's no real way for a platform to definitively know if you're selling legitimate items or not and sellers are legitimately allowed to resell any legit items they have bought so there's not even a definitive list of "who's allowed to sell product X" they could query to know.

ndriscoll• 8 months ago

I don't think anyone is alleging that these are illegitimate? It sounds like it's just copying the style, but not pretending to be the original/infringing on any trademark or anything.

rectang3• 8 months ago

Yes, the article alleges that the dupes are illegitimate:

They simply use Popflex’s copyrighted images without permission, sometimes editing the color of the skort in the photo to fit the listing. In May 2025 alone, Popflex counted 461 listings it believes infringe on its Pirouette Skort design patent, but it’s still a drop in the bucket of the thousands that Ho has encountered just by doing reverse image searches.

linksnapzz• 8 months ago

Warning: "Vox Media" property.

Sivart13• 8 months ago

...so?

ChrisArchitect• 8 months ago

Repackaged article collection:

July https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/709635/knock-it-off (https://archive.ph/Y0dvZ)

Nov https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/804409/perez-hilton-liv... (https://archive.ph/fuXL4)

Nov https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/818380/college-students... (https://archive.ph/Edc6G)

Dec https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/836456/influencers-tikt... (https://archive.ph/Atrlc)

dale_glass• 8 months ago

I don't think I've seen a web design this garish even on Geocities.

It's like somebody set out to do what the 90s Geocities couldn't, using modern tech.

tzs• 8 months ago

That's not garish.

This is garish: https://yvettesbridalformal.p1r8.net/

acessoproibido2• 8 months ago

This is genius tbh a work of art

Abekkus• 8 months ago

This CSS is specific to the article. Not the same across the site.

acessoproibido2• 8 months ago

I quite like it, really fitting for the topic too

anon_cow1111• 8 months ago

Ngl, I had a split second of "oh damn did I just pick up a url hijacker somewhere?" Especially with awkward gifs at the bottom.

dylan604• 8 months ago

90s Geocities sites never looked that clean.

dyauspitr• 8 months ago

Probably a matter of taste. I like it, it’s clean.

futuraperdita• 8 months ago

It's like somebody set out to do what the 90s Geocities couldn't, using modern tech.

This style is basically a sort of nostalgiacore and that's exactly what it's trying to do. It's heavily influenced by Web 1.0 and the time-smear of 1990s-2000s early Web culture.

themafia• 8 months ago

How the creator economy destroyed the internet

Let's put the blame where it belongs. Monopolistic companies destroyed the internet.

This is the media ecosystem we live in now — a supercharged shopping system that thrives on outrage, dominates the culture, and resists any real scrutiny because no one’s really in charge

That's the media ecosystem you've lived in your entire life. The internet, as always, just scaled up what we already had.

jrm4• 8 months ago

True, and I trust then that we look toward what actually fixes this, which is (boring) regulation and anti-trust work.

It's been done before, time to revamp for a new generation.

bogwog• 8 months ago

Let's put the blame where it belongs. Monopolistic companies destroyed the internet.

This is also true for more than just the internet.

CodingJeebus• 8 months ago

For real. I used think that society really suffered from a fractured media ecosystem compared to the monolithic pre-internet media era until I learned about how the US gov used the media to sway public opinion on invading Iraq back in 2003.

I don’t know if the current media environment is better than what we had then, but it’s pretty foolish to think that it’s automatically worse based on US foreign policy going back the last 50 years alone.

rtkwe3• 8 months ago

IMO this really misses the changes that the democratization of access to attention and media caused. Anyone being able to directly reach anyone is a massive change from the gate-kept pre-internet media landscape.

idle_zealot• 8 months ago

Anyone being able to directly reach anyone is a massive change from the gate-kept pre-internet media landscape.

Sure, but how are we supposed to disentangle this change from the concurrent growth of algorithmic feeds driving what people see? I have no doubt that democratization of communication would have social effects on its own, but we don't really know what those would be sans the simultaneous centralizing effect that dominant social media companies impose.

swatcoder• 8 months ago

The media ecosystem many of us had lived in included that but was not almost entirely that.

We had local newspapers, weeklies, and magazines, with local owners and editors, printing at local print shops, subsidized by local advertisers, dropped in boxes and stacked at local community hubs by local kids. Same for local radio stations and local television networks, although these had such high capital and regulation requirements that many of them were already being soaked up into larger networks more quickly.

As the online stuff emerged, we had local BBS's, and local forums and websites and blogs operated by local people, made known through the above local media channels or just through word of mouth.

Writers and editors and artists and merchants would be real people that circulated in the community, who would encounter readers/viewers/consumers face to face. Earnest small businesses that served a niche in the community could call up and get a reasonable price for an ad slot or classified listing without always having to bid in an auction against against an national brand with an effectively unlimited budget.

The last 10-20 years of the Internet, of social media and consolidation and the "Creator Economy", didn't just "scale up what we already had" -- it scaled up one small thing that we already had and displaced more or less everything else.

pkaye• 8 months ago

Craigslist killed off the classified section which was a big income source for newspapers. People didn't mind because Craigslist was free for most users.

tamimio• 8 months ago

As soon as you “monetize” something, you remove the fun out of it, it’s really that simple.

0manrho• 8 months ago

What the eye-fuck is this design?

Also, that's rich coming The Verge/Vox. Pot, meet Kettle.

How the Creator Economy Destroyed the Internet

Related Stories