Creators want their works to be seen. In the early Internet era, most content was hosted on various personal websites. It was discovered through word of mouth, yellow pages, or curated link collections such as Webring. Only after search engines took over, did content begin to be discovered through keyword searches in the early 2000s.

Currently, the top three keywords searched on Google are "Youtube", "Amazon", and "Facebook". The modern internet experience revolves around platforms. For users, and for creators too: new content is published on these platforms. Creators want their works to be seen and there is no better way to achieve that than relying on where the user base resides.

But, there are downsides with platforms as the primary way to discover content.

1. The platform's business success often requires locking as much content inside the platform as possible. This creates a single-point failure. If the platform fails, content locked to the platform and the creators' profiles are lost.
2. Platforms have power over creators. They can take cuts (mostly ranging from 8-30%; more influential platforms tend to take bigger cuts) from the creators' earnings, change push algorithms, arbitrarily take down content, and sell content and user data to third parties. Creators have little bargaining power—the cost of migrating to a new platform usually means losing an existing audience base.
3. Platform feeds tend to nurture passive content consumption behaviors and create information cocoons. It is in the platform's best interest to retain viewers, and the best way to do this is by making the viewers spontaneously consume content they already like. The decreasing number of sources to obtain inspiration can further lead to a decrease in content diversity and change the landscape of content creation.

Despite all these downsides, creators cannot go without platforms because the platforms have their audiences. Focusing on the unfairness and potential risks is pointless if the creators' content is not being seen. Therefore, if we are to create a new paradigm for content creation and consumption, it must first support effective content distribution.