Ask HN: Will good tech times come again?

Your post reminds me of my experience with webdevelopment. In the beginning it was all fun for me I helped many different clients with there websites and I enjoyed it a lot nevertheless it where simple Wordpress websites with custum themes. But the joy of learning wile doing helpt me to keep motivated. When I knew most things and could type more and more css and html without Googling (ducking) I lost my motivation more and more. After 2.5 year I had made about 15k next to studying IT at university and that was nice but all I did was moving pixels around on screens. So I desided that i was done with the dirty hacks the working with multiple developers over 1 ftp server and the moving around of pixels. So I made the design to stop using Wordpress and to quit for 1 full year to focus on game development.

So yes there is some truth in your message. Yes it is more difficult to start something but it is not impossible. I still have many connections with people who have very small website and are still earning there living from it from websites like torrentfreak to small local dutch news papers. The way they earn money has just changed.

The advice I got out of the past years is do something you enjoy. As long as you enjoy it the money and the project/website ideas will come to you.

I sort of think the opposite; the tools available now are much better and you can often design something to fit within the free tiers of various cloud operators and still scale to 100k users, and in personal experience small projects can get a good amount of use(rs) compared to the time to make them. Most projects don't though, and projects I've put a lot of time can just be ignored, so I tend to stick to just what I enjoy, and everything else is a plus. The centralization to towards facebook/twitter/youtube for discovered is a shame though.