My instinct is that there is some general principle that relates “friction” and “quality”, although I’m not sure I have the vocabulary to describe it.

I.e. where there is a barrier to entry, quality of results tends to improve.

I also see this in ease of publishing to social media, bias of “old music is better” (time has sorted wheat from chaff) and so on.

Perhaps there’s a well known description of this phenomenon somewhere already…

I would so love to help my many artist/musician friends get set up direct-to-consumer with digital content, subscriptions etc — and with their own shops, that they can run, in whatever funky style.

I think what you may be missing is the role of trust. There is much to say about that, but in this instance, a nice thing about RSS is that I can trust the algorithm it uses to generate my feed. It is very simple, and I, myself choose the sources it draws from. With some other systems, this is not the case.

An aside: I remember when I was a child, my dad’s favorite coffee mug was black ceramic with a white monotype slogan “Life’s a bitch and then you die”. If that made you chuckle, maybe you’re in a pretty good spot :)

People create with what is at hand — this includes ideas, not just physical media. In my opinion, suggesting there is society-wide progress (or lack of it) in art is silly, like suggesting the same for fashion or cooking. Exploration, technical evolution, yes. And progress in ideas, in society? Of course!

https://youtu.be/IgpcJN4qAAg?si=Khq6U1nxXi-9n73A