Generativity, Long Tail and the Mainstream

Something I find a lot on the many internet forums and message boards are threads that begin with the question "Am I the only person who (dis)likes ________?" And I'm glad to say that the first response to almost all of these threads is someone else answering "No, it's the internet, you're never the only one."
And it's true, you are never alone in opinion on the internet; to paraphrase Rule 34 (Google it, or don't), "If it exists there is...on the internet." The internet has a place where everyone and all of their niches can find others like them and share ideas about it. Every voice is heard by someone who wants to hear it, and that's amazing.
What's better about this for some people is that means anything on the internet can turn a profit. In an age where money is largely becoming more important than people's actual voices with regards to representation (thanks to cases like Citizen's United); that niche audiences can finally vote with what is really beginning to count.
The most exciting part about that, I think, is how it will change the mainstreaming of media. Before we continue, I would like to introduce the idea of Sturgeon's Law. Created by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, the law states that "90% of everything is crap." This type of philosophy fits in perfectly with how the mainstreaming of media usually has gone up to this point (much to the chagrin of hipsters).
Simply, when something is good, people will latch on to it and follow it and say how great it is. Thus it gets more attention, more people realize that thing to be good and it is mainstreamed and remembered as good stuff. This also means that whatever was not latched on to by a majority of people tends to be forgotten, swept away with the tide. This process also shapes the way we remember media. It's why people remember "GI Joe" over "MASK", "The Beatles" over "Jefferson Starship", "The Wizard of Oz" over "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari", "Superman" over "Doc. Savage" and "Sonic the Hedgehog" over "Alex Kidd" (Google any of that if you need to). What is deemed as good media is persisted by the public, and we think of it as good; while anything that isn't is forgotten is usually looked upon with disdain if at all. The reason we like to think we can remember media from a certain period so well is because we only pay attention to the 10% of it that seemed to stay with us anyway.
However, the internet upsets this a bit. With the internet, everything is remembered by someone, and it's never just one person. Now that everyone can find a sizable group of people who all enjoy something despite it's popularity. Without the internet "Firefly" would have been forgotten...and "Firefly" is AMAZING!
Sure, there are still hits, there will still be things that rise to the top and stay there for all of time to look back on and remember as cultural lynchpins. But when we look back on the internet, we won't all be telling stories about how good "Fred" and "Lonelygirl15" were; or how many people went crazy over "LOST" and "Community". Everyone will have their own content and big media staples that they remember. It may not completely get rid of the idea of the mainstream, but it widens the floodplain.