iuguy's Gandhi quote may be the best response, but I have something more verbose to say.
Popularity is powerful. Anything that matters is going to be dominated by popularity in some form. Politics, fast food, movies, etc, are all in the state they are due to winning popularity contests. The internet is just late to the party. The cool internet that agreed with your values just happened to be visible for the first few decades of its existence because you were the right demographic. However it was inevitable that sooner or later the public at large would get a whiff of how cool the net was, and pretty soon money comes into the equation, and it's all downhill.
But in reality the cool internet is bigger today than it ever was before, it's just obscured by all the spammy, sock-puppetry, pointless-celebrity-tweeting bullshit that you've come to expect. It's easy to fall into the trap that you need to compete with that, but you don't. Popularity is good for business, but it doesn't feed your soul. If you do really great work, the people who pay attention it will appreciate it immensely. There are bloggers who I believe contribute more to the world (at least my world) than Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Williams even though I use Facebook and Twitter every day.
Popularity is powerful. Anything that matters is going to be dominated by popularity in some form. Politics, fast food, movies, etc, are all in the state they are due to winning popularity contests. The internet is just late to the party. The cool internet that agreed with your values just happened to be visible for the first few decades of its existence because you were the right demographic. However it was inevitable that sooner or later the public at large would get a whiff of how cool the net was, and pretty soon money comes into the equation, and it's all downhill.
But in reality the cool internet is bigger today than it ever was before, it's just obscured by all the spammy, sock-puppetry, pointless-celebrity-tweeting bullshit that you've come to expect. It's easy to fall into the trap that you need to compete with that, but you don't. Popularity is good for business, but it doesn't feed your soul. If you do really great work, the people who pay attention it will appreciate it immensely. There are bloggers who I believe contribute more to the world (at least my world) than Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Williams even though I use Facebook and Twitter every day.