By treating content as a commodity, we risk solving the wrong puzzle. Finding answers means returning to the essential questions. Chapters 2 and 3 looked at the social dynamics between creators and the communities that form around them. I suggested that one-to-many models, typical among online creators, are centralized communities, with hidden roles played by both platforms and the creator’s audience; these communities stand in contrast to the distributed, many-to-many online communities we’re used to.

