There's a strong argument that, when you've got companies like Google/YouTube, Spotify, Amazon/Twitch, Patreon, etc at the top capable of paying their executive

There's a strong argument that, when you've got companies like Google/YouTube, Spotify, Amazon/Twitch, Patreon, etc at the top capable of paying their executives and engineers and other employees six to seven figure salaries, on the backs of their creatives who barely scrape by, there's an inequality there which isn't ethical. Twitch and YouTube, I think, are interesting ones in the sense that their system costs are probably enormous, primarily due to the 99% of content "creators" on their system which are actually just people like me, uploading videos which five people watch. A tragedy of the commons sort of thing, whereby they still pay to serve my videos, and that all cuts into the pie which is probably better given to professional content creators. But, I think that ultimately all of these platforms would be better ran and managed by the content creators themselves, or at least middlemen who have less of a multi-billion dollar profit incentive. There are a few interesting products heading this way; * Tidal (in music) was a big one, but we'll see what happens now that Square has majority ownership. * Itch.io [1] in gaming. They run what appears to be an extremely barebones operation focusing on delivering extreme value for creators and consumers alike. * Floatplane [2] in video. A service started by the team behind Linus Tech Tips, several high-profile (generally tech-focused) content creators now host their content there. We're also seeing this theme of "screw the middleman" among big media companies, opting to get rid of Netflix or Hulu in favor of their own in-house streaming platform, or Epic's fight against the App Store. It's literally the same impetus; these middlemen take way too much money and ultimately form lowest-common-denominator revenue models which don't benefit most content creators, from large to small. I think this is a trend that will continue to gain traction; I am not bullish on big-tech mega-platforms over the long term. To a degree it sucks for consumers, but ultimately a system which demands content creators scrape by while making big tech rich isn't tenable, and consumers need to recognize that. Big Tech has had years to try and build something equitable; they haven't. Its their fault, not the fault of the content creators. I tend to predict that Twitch is the next one which will see major disruption. The market even among big tech alternatives is basically zero, and Twitch has huge issues which reach beyond just monetization and into legal governance of streamer channels which is legitimately pissing off content creators and viewers alike. They're "stuck" with Twitch, but Twitch isn't actually that big; its just niche (hop on Chaturbate any evening, take one look at the average view-count for their streamers, and recalibrate your perception on Twitch's slice of the entire online streaming pie). [1] https://itch.io/ https://itch.io/ [2] https://www.floatplane.com https://www.floatplane.com