Content creation has simultaneously enriched and ruined many communities.
Selling Out I: The Allure of Riches
Selling Out II: The Golden Ages
I consider 2011-2015 to be the golden age of street workout. There was a beautiful simplicity in the scene at that time. Teenagers, mostly Slavic, were achieving world-class levels of strength using the most basic of playground or homemade equipment. They didn't have ultra-specialized tools or customized training and nutrition programs. I saw videos of seemingly everyday guys doing skills in their bedroom that gymnasts spend years developing and perfecting (there's a specialization factor here, of course, but the point still stands); others were training on playgrounds between giant Soviet bloc-style apartment buildings while young children stared at them in awe. Their success was a testament to their ambition and hard work, a direct insult and contradiction to those who claim they need chalk and perfect knurling and humidity control and supplements galore and 10 hours of sleep every night to get strong. These guys were unapologetically blowing past the limits that Big Fitness had put on them.
It felt like a fuck you to the establishment. Like looking someone in the eyes offering you money, turning them down, then proceeding to do what they said you couldn't without the money. It was so pure and focused on getting stronger, on unlocking feats of strength nobody else had. The videos weren't fancy, just simple 360p shots compiled together to form an amalgamation of motivation and envy.
It made you feel like you, too, could achieve this. If these guys from these poor countries with suboptimal training conditions could do it, why couldn't I, a man with plenty of time, access to nutrition, and financial support? I did achieve some amount of success. I actually got pretty strong, partially as a result of voraciously consuming these videos and trying to be like them, albeit without the subfreezing temperatures and playgrounds built for calisthenics.
And then the age of content creation took over. Athletes no longer shared videos for the love of the game, but the love of the money they got from peddling their course or e-book that promised the customer the magic pill that would help them achieve some skill in just a few short weeks or months! Enshittification had reached eastern Europe and poisoned the leaders.
More and more athletes were advertising their courses. More and more YouTube thumbnails were optimized for the algorithm to maximize clicks and retention. More and more videos started with "YO GUYS IT'S ME AGAIN FIRST HIT THAT LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE BUTTON AND NOW LET ME DRAG OUT THIS VIDEO FOR A BIT BEFORE SHOWING YOU WHAT YOU CAME HERE FOR" instead of just straight showing what we came here for.
And while the strength of the community continued to grow—more people were achieving Victorian crosses, more people were getting closer to the reverse planche, presses were starting lower—it still just felt...wrong, as if the original spirit of the sport was gone and replaced by some grotesque capitalistic version of its former self (and that's coming from someone who freaking loves capitalism!).
It appears as though the event horizon has been crossed for not just street workout, but other interests, too. What were once pure hobbies dedicated just to the hobby itself have become ways of extracting value from viewers.
This is sad and unfortunate. I would spend hours crawling VK's planche and handstand pages, oogling and oggling at what the people on there were capable of. The admins of these pages would accept contributions or crawl the website for potential reposts, collecting the top pictures and videos of their page's topic while lurkers like me enjoyed from afar. The pages are effectively dead now. I can't tell if they've just migrated to another page, another forum, or if it's actually dead, a relic of the past.
I lament everything else in the world that has fallen victim to the temptress of money and fame at the expense of its origin. I don't know what it's like to be financially struggling and have to choose to do this, and I'm doubtful I'd be strong enough to turn down significant money, especially if no better alternatives were in the vicinity. Heck, I don't even know if these guys do or don't enjoy the content creation they do now—maybe they love it and are happy to have discovered a niche that allows them to pursue their passion and get paid for it, despite the literature suggesting otherwise. (And just to be clear, the alternative of them continuing to live in not-so-great economic conditions for me to satisfy my nostalgic desires is not what I want—I want a world where their standard of living is so high that they don't have to game the YouTube algorithm!)
And in some sense, this is a proxy of the reach of the internet and the value that people can create using it. These athletes are both creating a market and responding to it. The infrastructure and opportunities just weren't available back then (as far as I remember), and now they are, providing at least the option to capitalize on it. And while I'm happy for them, it doesn't mean I can't miss the good ol' days.
Here are some videos from the golden age (GA):
And here are some videos from the new age (NA; note that some of these are from the same creators from above!):