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Imo we should be lauding this brand new sector and the folks that made it in it. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok literally created a new kind of millionaire. Are we just

by dvt 5y ago

Imo we should be lauding this brand new sector and the folks that made it in it. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok literally created a new kind of millionaire. Are we just upset we're also not uber rich for playing video games all day? It's the same with crypto, OnlyFans, and so on. It was the same in '99 with the dot coms. Merely from an economic standpoint, it's interesting to see who these new industries are displacing (since this is a zero sum game). I'm sure having zillions of dollars doesn't make you happy, but there's so much unwarranted hate here on HN for new ventures and disruptive industries, it's kind of odd. It feels HN has become way more corporatist in the past few years -- everyone wants to work for FAANG, no one wants to do their own thing. "If it's popular, it must be bad" is a pretty myopic view.

tw04 5y ago
> It's the same with crypto, OnlyFans, and so on. It was the same in '99 with the dot coms. Please don’t lump content creators in with crypto and dot bombs. The folks creating content on streaming platforms are providing entertainment and putting in real time doing a job. Equating them to what were/are more or less Ponzi schemes isn’t fair to them at all.
belval 5y ago
The article mentions that Tyler makes $300k per year in merchandise alone (so excluding any actual sponsored content). Frankly I don't get why this can't be seen as a legitimate very successful business. Where is the line? Is entertainment only valid on TV? YouTube? Some commenters here even said that it's all good now but that it won't work in his thirties or something as if there aren't a ton of jobs out there that feed on young blood that won't be able to keep up later in life. I completely agree with you, this kind of "this is not a real job" attitude really comes off as people upset that they can't be millionaires at their job. EDIT: A lot of the comments point out that most people on Twitch/YouTube/OnlyFans don't make money and would be better off getting a "real job". I am not trying to argue against that or say that Twitch is a good job prospect. My point is that if they do succeed in that niche, trying to segment money-making endeavour between "real jobs" and "just a kid playing video games" seems very vain to me. Tyler is making millions providing entertainment, to me that is very much a real job.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  Not a real job is a quite good stance to take. Because there is an absurd power law at play here, the absolute top make a lot of money. In a "real job" you are paid a living wage, on twitch you are paid scraps if you don't make it to the top.
  - belval 5y ago
    I am not saying this is a real job prospect. If a kid told me he wanted to be a Twitch streamer I'd say he can't be one, same as professional singer or musician in general. What I am saying that what Tyler has very much is a real job and successful business. You wouldn't say Taylor Swift is jobless because very few people make it in the pop music world.
    - obstacle1 5y ago
      >If a kid told me he wanted to be a Twitch streamer I'd say he can't be one You'd be lying though, and your kid would probably grow up to resent it. There are ways to educate kids about the relative risks of careers in good faith.
      - danny_codes 5y ago
        I believe OP was being hyperbolic.
      - belval 5y ago
        It was a volunteer oversimplification to explain my reasoning, not parenting advice.
    - jay_kyburz 5y ago
      If my kid told me they wanted to be a twitch streamer I would advise them against investing a significant amount of time and effort building a business with a single gatekeeper. If they wanted to be a famous personality, I would insist they start building a profile on every platform.
ridaj 5y ago
The challenge is that many of them have unsustainable always-on relationships with their audience that seriously burn them out. Sure folks should be free to do what they want with their life but remember they're not the only ones getting the benefit, they're feeding a bunch of social and merchandising platforms that make big $ on their backs - so the question becomes, what responsibility does the platform have towards the health of its creators?
- fragmede 5y ago
  Workaholics are nothing new and date back to well before the Internet or some TV show about the phenomenon.
  - ridaj 5y ago
    Yes, the new thing is the emergence of mega corporations that profit from platforms that are essentially manufacturing workaholics. Freewill notwithstanding, exploitative incentives are a real thing...
- kevmo314 5y ago
  Do investment banks have a responsibility towards not burning out their employees?
  - ridaj 5y ago
    There's at least a potential moral responsibility (yes pls spare snark about banks and morals), and in some countries it can be a legal one, see eg emergence of the "right to disconnect"
  - watwut 5y ago
    I would say yes. But also, that who industry is toxic cesspool of sociopaths. Moral responsibility is not a factor anyone in there considers.
kubb 5y ago
Why is it laudable? Sure, we shouldn't be jealous of successful people, but why go to the other extreme? It surely won't help you have an unbiased stance on the phenomenon.
- azth 5y ago
  Exactly. Making money is fine as long as it is done in a moral and ethical way. Women showing their bodies on twitch and others so guys can drool over them? No thanks.
  - selectodude 5y ago
    Sounds like you're just jealous nobody wants to spend money to look at you :)
    - azth 5y ago
      Like Magnus Carlsen said, do better :)
  - wpietri 5y ago
    What's unethical about that? I don't participate in either side of the market, so maybe I'm missing something. But it seems like a pretty clear service-for-money deal, with consenting adults on all sides and transparent revenue models.
    - azth 5y ago
      It spreads immorality and deviancy.
      - wpietri 5y ago
        How are you posting from the 1830s? And even in the 1830s, don't they teach people that tautology is bad?
        5y ago
serverholic 5y ago
Society is finding ways to value a wider range of talents. Different people are good at different things and, unfortunately, only a subset of those things are valued in the economy. These technologies are allowing people to display their talents and allowing them to make money off of them. Back in the day being good at video games was a fun thing to do when you had free time. Now there is a small chance you can make a living off it. I can't remember the quote but Warren Buffett once said that the only reason he is a billionaire is that he was born at the right time, with the right gender (back when women weren't allowed to do much), and with the right talents. Valuing a wider range of talents allows more people to participate in the economy. Crypto for example allows developers to inject little bits of economy into apps. Perhaps in the future someone can make a living creating really good cat memes instead of a deadend job that is basically useless anyways. If that last sentence offended you I'd suggest you checkout the book "Bullshit Jobs".
- paulpauper 5y ago
  >These technologies are allowing people to display their talents and allowing them to make money off of them. Back in the day being good at video games was a fun thing to do when you had free time. Now there is a small chance you can make a living off it. People have been making money from e-sports for a long time, at least two decades. it's not a new thing. The new platforms however allow gamers to reach large audiences without having to join a major gaming league.
lhorie 5y ago
> Imo we should be lauding this brand new sector I disagree. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok didn't create a new kind of millionaire. They're simply celebrities. The only thing that arguably changed is that content production is so cheap and saturated now that consumers get a lot more choice in terms of who they want to watch, without being constrained by TV schedules and other distribution/logistics limitations. There is no "new industries", it all still falls under the entertainment industry umbrella, and even the monetization mechanisms are the same old ones (ads, sponsorships, merchandising). By "lauding celebrities", all we're accomplishing is consolidate consumer attention into fewer content production channels, solidifying the position of the platforms where these celebrities operate. Arguably the only noteworthy thing here is that technology changes and companies that embrace innovation will eat the lunches of those that fail to keep up (e.g. Blockbuster). "Everyone wants to work for FAANG" because a good chunk of the entertainment industry money is flowing there.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  it is different. the old celebrities were chosen by media execs, who wielded all the power. now the audience decides.
  - dathinab 5y ago
    yes, it's basically strips gate-keepers from parts of the entertainment industry. Through it's still the entertainment industry as in: It requires a mixture of skill, hard work and luck to even just get to the point of earning more then just your basic-living expanses with it. Through we also have seen such a disruption in the music industries where with modern music services people can reach some degree of success without any deals with any large publishers (through it's not easy).
  - jackothy 5y ago
    That is partially true but not entirely. Twitch still has a somewhat strict TOS and regularly bans streamers. The audience is not always allowed to watch what they want. I'm guessing this is because Twitch needs to be advertiser friendly.
- 5y ago
sailingparrot 5y ago
> Imo we should be lauding this brand new sector and the folks that made it in it. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok literally created a new kind of millionaire. You provide no explanation as to why we should be lauding them. Or are you implying that because someone is a millionaire then we should automatically laud them? Is that what late stage capitalism looks like?
- sokoloff 5y ago
  They're providing something of value to their audience, through a combination of entertainment and merch/other sales. That's why they should be lauded (IMO).
- chii 5y ago
  one would laud them the same way HN lauds over successful startup founders and YC'ers. They are entrepreneurial and hardworking.
moolcool 5y ago
> It feels HN has become way more corporatist in the past few years It's a bit disheartening. It makes me wonder how the HN of today would react to someone like Aaron Swartz.
Mc91 5y ago
> It feels HN has become way more corporatist in the past few years -- everyone wants to work for FAANG, no one wants to do their own thing. You didn't have a situation like FAANG and its cohorts in the past, paying what they do and hiring like they do, in as attainable of a way. Banking $270k comp. as an L4 for a few years would allow me to "do my own thing" more than anything. If you mean people like Gates, Zuckerberg etc., they had giant safety nets to fall back on.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  Big corporations are paying more than ever, in addition to surging stock prices for even the biggest of companies, so working at a trillion dollar company is more lucrative than most startups. It did not always used to be that way.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    And given the scale factors involved it is still cheap, even at that level.
gnopgnip 5y ago
The economy is not a zero sum game.
- unbanned 5y ago
  Elaborate
  - gnopgnip 5y ago
    The output is not fixed. An economic system with a different distribution of resources, or different taxes and import restrictions can have a better outcome, or more economic output
paulpauper 5y ago
What hate is there? the majority of comments are supportive.
1290cc 5y ago
Youtube/Social Media has removed the filters and gatekeeping that happened in the legacy media. Of course there is a lot of noise. But what are the odds of a young MKBHD, DrDisrespect, Linus, etc, etc getting their own show in legacy media? Zero to none because we would've never heard about them. Its glorious to see people who are truly brilliant at what they do getting a shot at the audience and owning everything they do. Its not just Twitch Streamers and 20 something influencers. There is a deep world of niche experts opening up all sorts of interesting topics to everyone and the best get to stand front and center. My recent fav is Benn Jordan who breaks down a lot of the challenges of being an independent musician in a world of streaming. He recently did an incredible piece on how a NY Times reporter used his credentials to scam hundreds of musicians. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk872ERRVxA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk872ERRVxA
- dathinab 5y ago
  If you mean Linus from LTT, then wasn't he involved with some tech show which was "more legacy media-ish"? But either-way, it's not really that legacy media has a lot of gatekeepers which are a mixture of "stuck in the past", "focused on questionable qualifications" and/or "not-impartial/corrupt". I guess it's not surprising that such which benefit from being (with modern tech) unnecessary middle man and/or benefit from corruption are not happy about losing power and potentially becoming obsolete.
  - mewse-hn 5y ago
    Linus got his start doing product review videos for NCIX which was an online computer hardware shop up here in Canada. He had a fairly severe disagreement about the future of the company (his idea was to compete against amazon with kiosk-style brick and mortar with minimal inventory) so he went independent with his videos. It wasn't really a traditional media thing. NCIX died a couple years ago.
slightwinder 5y ago
People are generally upset when people succeed with evil deeds. And those new millionaires are often walking a very fine line between good and evil. The amount of trash they sell and scams they do is insane. And even the good ones still play on psychological mechanism, which can be questionable. Not saying that we should despise them all by default, but one should be very aware of the mechanism and plays of those people and not blindly accept everything. It's an entertaining space, but also a dangerous one. And that too many young people fuel this industry is a problem IMHO.
huetius 5y ago
I’m sure there are plenty of incoherent criticisms and not a small amount of envy at play, but there are more serious traditions of thought that are negative towards “culture industry,” writ large.
WanderPanda 5y ago
It is not zero sum. People only switch to these new sources of entertainment because they get more value from it
- unbanned 5y ago
  What do you mean it's not zero sum
- slothtrop 5y ago
  The word "switch" kind of implies that it is zero sum; they're either watching one thing, or another. Entertainers and companies compete to monopolize attention.
darcys22 5y ago
Yeah i agree, twitch and youtube are producing a new type of celebrity where the content can be created by anyone. Its build your own content, create your own community and do it all yourself. This is disrupting the old entertainment industry where you needed many well connected people to connect you to the audience, and your content was reviewed heavily by ‘experts’ before production. The content is easier to produce due to technology, and this is personal opinion but its way better than what was made by television studios etc.
coolso 5y ago
> Are we just upset we're also not uber rich for playing video games all day? There's envy involved but I do think a large contributing factor is also the fact that what streamers and influencers and the like do, and what their "influencees" do, tends to very much lean towards being very mindless. It's like celebrity worship, except there's this "they're just like you and me!" aspect to it that feels incredibly disingenuous. Instead of going out and doing things, you have people sitting on their butts watching someone else sit on their butts and do that stuff. Instead of people bettering themselves and going out and getting a girlfriend, you have people paying to pretend those lewd photos of some random girl who mentioned your username on a stream once because you tipped her which means she totally knows you exist and is basically your girlfriend, were taken just for you. On top of that one of the main goals for these people is to get you to buy products from their sponsors. They're like the used car salesmen who try to buddy up to you and flatter you so you'll buy one of their cars. Except people know used car salesmen are bullshitting them. And people know celebrities aren't like you and me. People connect to streamers and influencers and spend more time worshiping them on a different level that feels unhealthy. Don't get me wrong, I do think they provide some benefits to society. You can say that these sort of people help others feel like part of a family or whatever, and helps those who have a hard time getting a girlfriend feel better. On the other hand, you could also just point to, for example, the suicide rates which have been trending upward pretty steadily, especially starting with the prevalence of smartphones and such. Or the fact that antidepressant usage has essentially doubled in the past two decades. Overall, to me, it all just feels like a trend in the wrong direction.
dave_sullivan 5y ago
> Are we just upset we're also not uber rich for playing video games all day? It's the same with crypto, OnlyFans, and so on. It was the same in '99 with the dot coms Yes, that's literally it. This is the proper use of the term hater. > It feels HN has become way more corporatist in the past few years -- everyone wants to work for FAANG, no one wants to do their own thing Also agree. I liked HN better years ago. When I was younger.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 5y ago
I don't see it that way. HN is many different things to many different people. Sure, there are a large number or corporate workers on HN, but given the number of people employed at the top 5 tech companies alone that shouldn't be a surprise. But there are other substantial areas of interest and overlap: the creatives / makers, the one person businesses, the SMBs (both owner/operators and employees), the start-ups (founders, co-workers), the people pushing some agenda or other (those can be quite annoying) and finally the trolls and even some griefers, though the latter two groups usually find their accounts very short lived (with some regrettable exceptions). HN has gotten large enough that it is no longer a niche player, but still small enough that it hasn't reached the 'everybody's on it' stage. But I don't see that 'unwarranted hate for new ventures and disruptive industries'. What you do get is a crowd that isn't going to roll over right away at the first sign of a 'new thing'. In that sense we are probably becoming a bit jaded, having seen 25 years of one new thing after another.
solidblu 5y ago
I agree with everything you said except FAANG. To keep with the corporatist shill culture it is now technically MANGA instead of FAANG with Facebook’s rebranding to Meta.
dang 5y ago
Your comment doesn't reflect how this thread ended up developing—quite the opposite, in fact. It's important not to overgeneralize from a few datapoints that one dislikes - this routinely leads people to false conclusions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20dislike%20notice&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22false%20feelings%20of%20generality%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... You may have gotten bitten by a variant of the contrarian dynamic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22%20objection%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) in which initial comments are shallow dismissals and then more substantive comments appear over time. The initial comments don't characterize the community. They just appear first because they're reflexive reactions (the fastest kind of reaction to have) and they're shallow (the fastest kind of comment to write). https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

by dvt 5y ago

tw04 5y ago

> It's the same with crypto, OnlyFans, and so on. It was the same in '99 with the dot coms. Please don’t lump content creators in with crypto and dot bombs. The folks creating content on streaming platforms are providing entertainment and putting in real time doing a job. Equating them to what were/are more or less Ponzi schemes isn’t fair to them at all.

belval 5y ago

The article mentions that Tyler makes $300k per year in merchandise alone (so excluding any actual sponsored content). Frankly I don't get why this can't be seen as a legitimate very successful business. Where is the line? Is entertainment only valid on TV? YouTube? Some commenters here even said that it's all good now but that it won't work in his thirties or something as if there aren't a ton of jobs out there that feed on young blood that won't be able to keep up later in life. I completely agree with you, this kind of "this is not a real job" attitude really comes off as people upset that they can't be millionaires at their job. EDIT: A lot of the comments point out that most people on Twitch/YouTube/OnlyFans don't make money and would be better off getting a "real job". I am not trying to argue against that or say that Twitch is a good job prospect. My point is that if they do succeed in that niche, trying to segment money-making endeavour between "real jobs" and "just a kid playing video games" seems very vain to me. Tyler is making millions providing entertainment, to me that is very much a real job.

kzrdude 5y ago
Not a real job is a quite good stance to take. Because there is an absurd power law at play here, the absolute top make a lot of money. In a "real job" you are paid a living wage, on twitch you are paid scraps if you don't make it to the top.
- belval 5y ago
  I am not saying this is a real job prospect. If a kid told me he wanted to be a Twitch streamer I'd say he can't be one, same as professional singer or musician in general. What I am saying that what Tyler has very much is a real job and successful business. You wouldn't say Taylor Swift is jobless because very few people make it in the pop music world.
  - obstacle1 5y ago
    >If a kid told me he wanted to be a Twitch streamer I'd say he can't be one You'd be lying though, and your kid would probably grow up to resent it. There are ways to educate kids about the relative risks of careers in good faith.
    - danny_codes 5y ago
      I believe OP was being hyperbolic.
    - belval 5y ago
      It was a volunteer oversimplification to explain my reasoning, not parenting advice.
  - jay_kyburz 5y ago
    If my kid told me they wanted to be a twitch streamer I would advise them against investing a significant amount of time and effort building a business with a single gatekeeper. If they wanted to be a famous personality, I would insist they start building a profile on every platform.

ridaj 5y ago

The challenge is that many of them have unsustainable always-on relationships with their audience that seriously burn them out. Sure folks should be free to do what they want with their life but remember they're not the only ones getting the benefit, they're feeding a bunch of social and merchandising platforms that make big $ on their backs - so the question becomes, what responsibility does the platform have towards the health of its creators?

fragmede 5y ago
Workaholics are nothing new and date back to well before the Internet or some TV show about the phenomenon.
- ridaj 5y ago
  Yes, the new thing is the emergence of mega corporations that profit from platforms that are essentially manufacturing workaholics. Freewill notwithstanding, exploitative incentives are a real thing...
kevmo314 5y ago
Do investment banks have a responsibility towards not burning out their employees?
- ridaj 5y ago
  There's at least a potential moral responsibility (yes pls spare snark about banks and morals), and in some countries it can be a legal one, see eg emergence of the "right to disconnect"
- watwut 5y ago
  I would say yes. But also, that who industry is toxic cesspool of sociopaths. Moral responsibility is not a factor anyone in there considers.

kubb 5y ago

Why is it laudable? Sure, we shouldn't be jealous of successful people, but why go to the other extreme? It surely won't help you have an unbiased stance on the phenomenon.

azth 5y ago
Exactly. Making money is fine as long as it is done in a moral and ethical way. Women showing their bodies on twitch and others so guys can drool over them? No thanks.
- selectodude 5y ago
  Sounds like you're just jealous nobody wants to spend money to look at you :)
  - azth 5y ago
    Like Magnus Carlsen said, do better :)
- wpietri 5y ago
  What's unethical about that? I don't participate in either side of the market, so maybe I'm missing something. But it seems like a pretty clear service-for-money deal, with consenting adults on all sides and transparent revenue models.
  - azth 5y ago
    It spreads immorality and deviancy.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      How are you posting from the 1830s? And even in the 1830s, don't they teach people that tautology is bad?
      - 5y ago

serverholic 5y ago

Society is finding ways to value a wider range of talents. Different people are good at different things and, unfortunately, only a subset of those things are valued in the economy. These technologies are allowing people to display their talents and allowing them to make money off of them. Back in the day being good at video games was a fun thing to do when you had free time. Now there is a small chance you can make a living off it. I can't remember the quote but Warren Buffett once said that the only reason he is a billionaire is that he was born at the right time, with the right gender (back when women weren't allowed to do much), and with the right talents. Valuing a wider range of talents allows more people to participate in the economy. Crypto for example allows developers to inject little bits of economy into apps. Perhaps in the future someone can make a living creating really good cat memes instead of a deadend job that is basically useless anyways. If that last sentence offended you I'd suggest you checkout the book "Bullshit Jobs".

paulpauper 5y ago
>These technologies are allowing people to display their talents and allowing them to make money off of them. Back in the day being good at video games was a fun thing to do when you had free time. Now there is a small chance you can make a living off it. People have been making money from e-sports for a long time, at least two decades. it's not a new thing. The new platforms however allow gamers to reach large audiences without having to join a major gaming league.

lhorie 5y ago

> Imo we should be lauding this brand new sector I disagree. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok didn't create a new kind of millionaire. They're simply celebrities. The only thing that arguably changed is that content production is so cheap and saturated now that consumers get a lot more choice in terms of who they want to watch, without being constrained by TV schedules and other distribution/logistics limitations. There is no "new industries", it all still falls under the entertainment industry umbrella, and even the monetization mechanisms are the same old ones (ads, sponsorships, merchandising). By "lauding celebrities", all we're accomplishing is consolidate consumer attention into fewer content production channels, solidifying the position of the platforms where these celebrities operate. Arguably the only noteworthy thing here is that technology changes and companies that embrace innovation will eat the lunches of those that fail to keep up (e.g. Blockbuster). "Everyone wants to work for FAANG" because a good chunk of the entertainment industry money is flowing there.

paulpauper 5y ago
it is different. the old celebrities were chosen by media execs, who wielded all the power. now the audience decides.
- dathinab 5y ago
  yes, it's basically strips gate-keepers from parts of the entertainment industry. Through it's still the entertainment industry as in: It requires a mixture of skill, hard work and luck to even just get to the point of earning more then just your basic-living expanses with it. Through we also have seen such a disruption in the music industries where with modern music services people can reach some degree of success without any deals with any large publishers (through it's not easy).
- jackothy 5y ago
  That is partially true but not entirely. Twitch still has a somewhat strict TOS and regularly bans streamers. The audience is not always allowed to watch what they want. I'm guessing this is because Twitch needs to be advertiser friendly.
5y ago

sailingparrot 5y ago

> Imo we should be lauding this brand new sector and the folks that made it in it. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok literally created a new kind of millionaire. You provide no explanation as to why we should be lauding them. Or are you implying that because someone is a millionaire then we should automatically laud them? Is that what late stage capitalism looks like?

sokoloff 5y ago
They're providing something of value to their audience, through a combination of entertainment and merch/other sales. That's why they should be lauded (IMO).
chii 5y ago
one would laud them the same way HN lauds over successful startup founders and YC'ers. They are entrepreneurial and hardworking.

moolcool 5y ago

> It feels HN has become way more corporatist in the past few years It's a bit disheartening. It makes me wonder how the HN of today would react to someone like Aaron Swartz.

Mc91 5y ago

> It feels HN has become way more corporatist in the past few years -- everyone wants to work for FAANG, no one wants to do their own thing. You didn't have a situation like FAANG and its cohorts in the past, paying what they do and hiring like they do, in as attainable of a way. Banking $270k comp. as an L4 for a few years would allow me to "do my own thing" more than anything. If you mean people like Gates, Zuckerberg etc., they had giant safety nets to fall back on.

paulpauper 5y ago
Big corporations are paying more than ever, in addition to surging stock prices for even the biggest of companies, so working at a trillion dollar company is more lucrative than most startups. It did not always used to be that way.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  And given the scale factors involved it is still cheap, even at that level.

gnopgnip 5y ago

The economy is not a zero sum game.

unbanned 5y ago
Elaborate
- gnopgnip 5y ago
  The output is not fixed. An economic system with a different distribution of resources, or different taxes and import restrictions can have a better outcome, or more economic output

paulpauper 5y ago

What hate is there? the majority of comments are supportive.

1290cc 5y ago

Youtube/Social Media has removed the filters and gatekeeping that happened in the legacy media. Of course there is a lot of noise. But what are the odds of a young MKBHD, DrDisrespect, Linus, etc, etc getting their own show in legacy media? Zero to none because we would've never heard about them. Its glorious to see people who are truly brilliant at what they do getting a shot at the audience and owning everything they do. Its not just Twitch Streamers and 20 something influencers. There is a deep world of niche experts opening up all sorts of interesting topics to everyone and the best get to stand front and center. My recent fav is Benn Jordan who breaks down a lot of the challenges of being an independent musician in a world of streaming. He recently did an incredible piece on how a NY Times reporter used his credentials to scam hundreds of musicians. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk872ERRVxA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk872ERRVxA

dathinab 5y ago
If you mean Linus from LTT, then wasn't he involved with some tech show which was "more legacy media-ish"? But either-way, it's not really that legacy media has a lot of gatekeepers which are a mixture of "stuck in the past", "focused on questionable qualifications" and/or "not-impartial/corrupt". I guess it's not surprising that such which benefit from being (with modern tech) unnecessary middle man and/or benefit from corruption are not happy about losing power and potentially becoming obsolete.
- mewse-hn 5y ago
  Linus got his start doing product review videos for NCIX which was an online computer hardware shop up here in Canada. He had a fairly severe disagreement about the future of the company (his idea was to compete against amazon with kiosk-style brick and mortar with minimal inventory) so he went independent with his videos. It wasn't really a traditional media thing. NCIX died a couple years ago.

slightwinder 5y ago

People are generally upset when people succeed with evil deeds. And those new millionaires are often walking a very fine line between good and evil. The amount of trash they sell and scams they do is insane. And even the good ones still play on psychological mechanism, which can be questionable. Not saying that we should despise them all by default, but one should be very aware of the mechanism and plays of those people and not blindly accept everything. It's an entertaining space, but also a dangerous one. And that too many young people fuel this industry is a problem IMHO.

huetius 5y ago

I’m sure there are plenty of incoherent criticisms and not a small amount of envy at play, but there are more serious traditions of thought that are negative towards “culture industry,” writ large.

WanderPanda 5y ago

It is not zero sum. People only switch to these new sources of entertainment because they get more value from it

unbanned 5y ago
What do you mean it's not zero sum
slothtrop 5y ago
The word "switch" kind of implies that it is zero sum; they're either watching one thing, or another. Entertainers and companies compete to monopolize attention.

darcys22 5y ago

Yeah i agree, twitch and youtube are producing a new type of celebrity where the content can be created by anyone. Its build your own content, create your own community and do it all yourself. This is disrupting the old entertainment industry where you needed many well connected people to connect you to the audience, and your content was reviewed heavily by ‘experts’ before production. The content is easier to produce due to technology, and this is personal opinion but its way better than what was made by television studios etc.

coolso 5y ago

> Are we just upset we're also not uber rich for playing video games all day? There's envy involved but I do think a large contributing factor is also the fact that what streamers and influencers and the like do, and what their "influencees" do, tends to very much lean towards being very mindless. It's like celebrity worship, except there's this "they're just like you and me!" aspect to it that feels incredibly disingenuous. Instead of going out and doing things, you have people sitting on their butts watching someone else sit on their butts and do that stuff. Instead of people bettering themselves and going out and getting a girlfriend, you have people paying to pretend those lewd photos of some random girl who mentioned your username on a stream once because you tipped her which means she totally knows you exist and is basically your girlfriend, were taken just for you. On top of that one of the main goals for these people is to get you to buy products from their sponsors. They're like the used car salesmen who try to buddy up to you and flatter you so you'll buy one of their cars. Except people know used car salesmen are bullshitting them. And people know celebrities aren't like you and me. People connect to streamers and influencers and spend more time worshiping them on a different level that feels unhealthy. Don't get me wrong, I do think they provide some benefits to society. You can say that these sort of people help others feel like part of a family or whatever, and helps those who have a hard time getting a girlfriend feel better. On the other hand, you could also just point to, for example, the suicide rates which have been trending upward pretty steadily, especially starting with the prevalence of smartphones and such. Or the fact that antidepressant usage has essentially doubled in the past two decades. Overall, to me, it all just feels like a trend in the wrong direction.

dave_sullivan 5y ago

> Are we just upset we're also not uber rich for playing video games all day? It's the same with crypto, OnlyFans, and so on. It was the same in '99 with the dot coms Yes, that's literally it. This is the proper use of the term hater. > It feels HN has become way more corporatist in the past few years -- everyone wants to work for FAANG, no one wants to do their own thing Also agree. I liked HN better years ago. When I was younger.

deleted 5y ago

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jacquesm 5y ago

I don't see it that way. HN is many different things to many different people. Sure, there are a large number or corporate workers on HN, but given the number of people employed at the top 5 tech companies alone that shouldn't be a surprise. But there are other substantial areas of interest and overlap: the creatives / makers, the one person businesses, the SMBs (both owner/operators and employees), the start-ups (founders, co-workers), the people pushing some agenda or other (those can be quite annoying) and finally the trolls and even some griefers, though the latter two groups usually find their accounts very short lived (with some regrettable exceptions). HN has gotten large enough that it is no longer a niche player, but still small enough that it hasn't reached the 'everybody's on it' stage. But I don't see that 'unwarranted hate for new ventures and disruptive industries'. What you do get is a crowd that isn't going to roll over right away at the first sign of a 'new thing'. In that sense we are probably becoming a bit jaded, having seen 25 years of one new thing after another.

solidblu 5y ago

I agree with everything you said except FAANG. To keep with the corporatist shill culture it is now technically MANGA instead of FAANG with Facebook’s rebranding to Meta.

dang 5y ago

Your comment doesn't reflect how this thread ended up developing—quite the opposite, in fact. It's important not to overgeneralize from a few datapoints that one dislikes - this routinely leads people to false conclusions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20dislike%20notice&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22false%20feelings%20of%20generality%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... You may have gotten bitten by a variant of the contrarian dynamic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22%20objection%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) in which initial comments are shallow dismissals and then more substantive comments appear over time. The initial comments don't characterize the community. They just appear first because they're reflexive reactions (the fastest kind of reaction to have) and they're shallow (the fastest kind of comment to write). https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...