Nah, it's always been like this. The internet only lets us see it. There are just as many people thinking and creating as at any time. Even the real Dark Ages had a lot going on, even though on the surface it looked like all religion and war..
I think that for a hobby that lived at the edge of popular science, it'll be a killer. Although you never know - things move in waves sometimes and maybe a new generation of citizen scientists will find a way to save the internet from its anti-social directions. That remains to be seen.
I would love to see a strong wing of the hobby that has a focus on conservation breeding and eco-education, in partnership with the people studying biodiversity and evolutionary biology. That's a used to be now. This hobby can show us what we're destroying. We could be working with local fishing communities in the countries where our fish are found. As we learn, maybe we do something about it. Right now we're in one of those phases where we're interested in breeding larger tails, hybridization and selling fish as commodities. Maybe we'll get back to marvelling at newly found fish, and appreciating them by wanting to learn about their stories. Today's hobby is moving as far away from nature as it can get. If there's still a hobby in a few years, people will get bored with that, and maybe they'll steer it back to what I'd like to see.
Or maybe they won't..
I like beer. For ages, all we could get was boring swill. Then came the micro-breweries, selling stuff the Petco Breweries had stopped creating. A lot of it was crudely hopped IPA and trendy stuff, but a core of good, small breweries set up by ordinary people developed, and still haven't been bought out by the corporate boys. They will be, because that's how the market operates, but maybe the good product will remain as a side line, as long as people remain interested. That'll give us something to talk about.
I hope that happens with the fish hobby, and that the brewers of ideas hop to it soon!
