If we're going to get into the pissing contest I was 15 when I started slangin porn for $10k a month and being a real dick about it
There really are valid arguments on both sides, but I will tell you luck has more than anybody admits to, and that goes for people on both sides of the aisle. Poor people will tell you they're being intentionally repressed by a system that was designed to enslave them. Successful people will tell you that they are successful because they made the obvious right decisions and worked hard.
Now I'm 30. When I was in high school they said if I like computers I should do IT and make a starting salary of $80,000 a year doing CISCO networking. I blew off college, just kept on learning computer science, hustling and wound up able to demand as much money as I want. Let's be real though, that's what I wanted to do. I didn't predict that with all those people going into IT sysadmins wouldn't be worth shit in 2014. I also wouldn't have told you all the people working hard to get degrees to work in the media, newspapers and all that would have their whole industry collapse and wind up working at Starbucks. Nobody can predict the future, and it's nobody's fault, but their are plenty of people who did the right things and still wound up struggling right now.
Now I'm a real software engineer. I still do web stuff, but I've also done massive enterprise software in manufacturing, logistics and finance. I can measure success in the amount of people who get laid off when I make something awesome. There are dozens of companies right now that have zero people working in logistics because I personally did the math to take them out of the equation. That's $50,000,000/year for one service where 5 engineers replaced? I don't know? obviously a few times more than $50,000,000 worth of white collar jobs. That was at the very start of the full automation too, lord knows how much it's worth now (if they haven't imploded, but that's a whole other thing).
Now I don't feel guilty, but I feel bad. These weren't dumb people. They were hard working, had great organizational skills, mediated between hundreds of companies at a time making things happen. They had lots of money riding on their performance, but now they're unemployed. I get when people are really upset and they want to blame us, because it's hard to look at the guy who is replacing you with an algorithm and not think he's motivated to end your career. It's very real that there's a conspiracy to get a result (a profitable business that can compete in the future) that necessarily means a massive amount of financial hardship for a lot of people.
Just saying, give each other a break and stop trying to put such a disproportional amount of blame on people. Things are the way they are, it's the way the universe works.
Also, watch out you guys. Adult is always way behind the curve because it's a microcosm with tiny profit margins, but in mainstream web publishing we're all working on artificial intelligence that makes editorial staff obsolete. Most of the stories about finance and sports you see on big news sites in the top 10 Google results on any given day are written entirely by computers. We are destroying the idea of the small web entrepreneur, blogger, the niche ecommerce business, all that. All it would take are a few of the people from the valley or the alley to actually attack porn and everyone on here would feel like the guys running the porn theaters must have.