This is something that I just thought of during the Friday/Saturday stream.

Why is there a strong demand for gatekeeping nowadays? Back then, our hobbies stayed niche for as long as they did but barely any gatekeeping were done per se.

Let me put it this way:
In a certain continent, lands were separated by bodies of water. Then after many years or even centuries, certain parts of the land dry up so now, most of the lands can be accessed by foot. People from various lands took advantage of these so most eventually prospered. To make the long story short, you can connect the dots from here to the current situation we are in now.

The point is, I believe they didn't do any gatekeeping back then like we are supposed to do in current year. Its just that it only took little effort to gatekeep and the rest of gatekeeping happened naturally. Taking my experience and perhaps few of yours as well, I remember the days of betamax and VHS and I also believe that the boomer hentai series such as Urotsukidoji, La Blue Girl and so on are even rarer to come up even compared to XXX videos. Then comes the internet and as time goes by, more and more countries gained access to it then how the available bandwidth got larger.

On the early days of internet plus living in a third-world country, we were more than excited to communicate overseas especially given that we are among the top exporter of meat labor in the world. We were excited to gain and share media and what's not to anything overseas like latest cartoons, anime, comics, manga, etc. But then, until we had affordable bandwidth a little less than current year, we had to use dozens or even hundreds of floppy disks subdivided into rar/zip files to transfer files from your friends' PC to yours. A little time passed and we had to store them in CDs, then DVDs, then BDs... just figure out the rest will 'ya?

So there we have it: Convenience. Things became convenient that getting into niche hobbies are easier even to normies. Yeah, we can go back to the good 'ol days via Digital ID and region locking but we all know what is not the purpose of these methods, just like we can't expect another flood to make lands divided again. So if there are gatekeeping that needs to happen, they should be done 'manually' unlike back then.