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When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career

jjmarr 3y ago
> It makes me wonder if a sort of "basic income for Internet creators" would work. Instead of individuals trying to optimize their content for maximum income, it would instead work like this: if the group determines that you make great content, you get a small stipend monthly. There are no other expectations or optimization requirements, merely that you continue making the content I think you invented Patreon.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Yeah, but Patreon is still beholden to the individual-market optimizer model. I'm talking about a group, a collective, that deliberately funds stuff that is merely good content. Maybe a collective Patreon-like "guild" would be a starting point.
  - CactusOnFire 3y ago
    The politics of who does vs doesn't make the cut sounds difficult to manage. I think an individualist model makes sense, or barring that, a group Patreon (i.e. a music label instead of an individual band).
    - keiferski 3y ago
      It would be difficult to manage, but not impossible. Certainly if you have a strong organizational culture and know what your org values. Like universities, for example. At least in the past. Otherwise you’re just dependent on the popularity of the market, which I don’t think is a great thing all of the time. There are a lot of things I’d enjoy reading or writing that have zero monetary value and thus are strongly incentivized against existing.
      - greenavocado 3y ago
        You just discovered what a corporation is. Corporations have "boards" that decide what is "good" and can invest in those things to develop them and sell them or give them away with approval from this board. The corporation receives funding from customers and investors to keep going.
        keiferski 3y ago
        I guess? But clearly this corporate model isn’t really being used to make the kind of content people wish existed.
        greenavocado 3y ago
        The main roadblock for content creators is the distribution channels. Content creators require attention. Attention is the hardest thing to obtain. TikTok broke through and stole lots of attention away from YouTube. Content creators aren't able to grow a massive following of their own because of the discoverability crisis on the Internet. Google and many other platforms are putting up high wall prisons (I refuse to called them "walled gardens") to hold on to user attention as tightly as possible.
  - sharkjacobs 3y ago
    Either you're inventing reddit-but-each-upvote-is-worth-a-fraction-of-a-cent, or there is some sort of select professional board who is responsible for deciding what is "good content" on behalf of the public. Sort of like national public arts grants, or maybe public broadcasters like the BBC. Right? Or are you imagining some third model
    - sharkjacobs 3y ago
      the thing about "basic income" is that it's basic. It's unconditional. It's a an efficient way for a government to guarantee a minimum quality of life for its citizens. As soon as you tie it to producing "good content" or something, the whole thing becomes about meeting that criteria. Ad views are a gameable target. So are upvotes. So is board approval.
      - SoftTalker 3y ago
        Yep the whole thing would quickly devolve into arguments over what is good or whether some irrelevant personal idiosyncracy of the creator should prohibit him getting paid for his otherwise "good" content.
    - keiferski 3y ago
      I’m imagining something like this: a rich guy who likes art takes a million dollars and makes an organization that funds people writing about art, paying them $1,000 a month. (Exact amounts don’t matter.) He sets up a list of values and rules that are broad enough to not be limiting and specific enough to get what he wants. He personally picks the first 100 people involved, and then all further decision making involves him + those 100 people + new entrants. The specific setup could be debated but the basic idea is just that the group funds things that match its values.
      - drekipus 3y ago
        This already happens, somewhat in richer circles. Frank Zappa has a quote about this very thing actually.
      - 3y ago
  - stackskipton 3y ago
    There are groups you can fund on Patreon that have a bunch of creators under them. Second Wind which is spin off old Escapist staff is one. The issue with these groups if there is a popular person in them, they will generally leave the group and start their own thing because they can get more money. So you will still have issues where top tier creators want all money and don't want to "subsidize" smaller creators.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > I'm talking about a group, a collective, that deliberately funds stuff that is merely good content This is a newspaper or think tank. It can be donor, ad or reader (i.e. paywall) supported.
  - jjmarr 3y ago
    You can donate to non-profit museums or art galleries where you live, and they will use that money to fund artists. edit: or you can donate to a non-profit newspaper, or think tank, or any other type of institution that deals with this. I'm not trying to be condescending, but the question to be asked shouldn't be "why doesn't this exist". It should be "why aren't more people aware of and using this?"
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    That sounds like an artist's network. A lot of podcasts have networks, there are some webcomic networks, etc. The problem with networks, much like with insurance networks (but kind of backwards), is making sure that the superstars that hit it big and bring in a disproportionate amount of the money don't spin off into a solo career to keep more of the money themselves, while also not making them feel trapped and resentful in a contract jail.
    - keiferski 3y ago
      I think that the content from the “old web” that people miss isn’t really superstar quality. It’s more like an extensive nerdy guide on a niche topic. So I wouldn’t anticipate this being a huge issue.
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    > I'm talking about a group, a collective, that deliberately funds stuff that is merely good content Why does this group need to be different from the general Youtube (insert any platform here) audience that votes with their views/likes/subscribes ? What am I missing?
    - keiferski 3y ago
      Because the YouTuber watcher votes for MrBeast, not for the niche intellectual content that populated the early web. The point is to decouple quality content creation from the ad-matrix and fund it in other ways.
- person23 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Solvency 3y ago
    [flagged]
- chx 3y ago
  Except Patreon banned a lot of Ukranian vloggers and did not ban Russian propaganda. For example, WarGonzo is still on it (just checked) and Ayder Muzhdabayev and Serhii Sternenko are not. Check https://youtu.be/91US4DNcBGw https://youtu.be/91US4DNcBGw as well. This made me delete my Patreon.
cogman10 3y ago
Wouldn't work, because it's chasing after the dollar that has ultimately destroyed the internet. Because the internet means income for so many people, doing whatever it takes to get your website to the top of search results matters a lot. That means that the hobbyist making a website cannot compete with the businesses who's lifeblood depend on edging those hobbyist pages off the search results. What made the old internet so great was your search in lycos or yahoo could pull up a result from hobbyists across the internet with a good chance of being just an honest info dump by a fan. That became an issue when the ad money started entering the mix. All the sudden we got things like ask jeeves and expert sex change edging out good content for their garbage "Hey, we also searched those keywords" landing pages. Google's initial value ad was the fact that it gave you good results that avoided these tactics. I'm afraid the old internet is simply gone forever. There will always be someone willing to break the system to get on top so they can make the money.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  I can do without "creators" at all, which I guess explains why my online time these days is mostly spent scurrying around the wainscoting of the web: HN, marginalia, etc. "Away to the hills, to the caves, to the rocks Ere I own an usurper, I'll couch with the fox" These days you can even find some seriously deep cuts, like some hobbyist from the XII explaining how to calculate with the newfangled arabic numerals: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84900936/f151.item https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84900936/f151.item
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  Maybe we just need a search engine more dedicated to surfacing the hobbyists over the spammers.
  - cogman10 3y ago
    And maybe we just need a new social media platform geared towards the youth ;) Unless the search engine aggressively curates it's target pages, I can't see how it wouldn't end up falling down the same trap as search engines of the past. Much like all social media sites end up overran by grandmas.
alabhyajindal 3y ago
Exactly. Seeing a lot of articles on HN reminiscing the old internet and it's getting tiring.
bdw5204 3y ago
I think a better solution would be to bring back strong career security. Allowing companies to increase their profits by laying off workers is a policy choice. As is allowing companies to outsource jobs to cheaper jurisdictions. There is no law of nature that says that the US has to allow free trade to impoverish and dispossess its middle class so that its upper class can get even wealthier.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  Not allowing companies to lay off workers who aren't doing productive work would put them at a competitive disadvantage against foreign competitors or new companies, and then they still lose their jobs when the company goes bust. Not allowing new companies to compete with existing ones would entrench monopolies and accelerate concentration of wealth. Neither of these are desirable results.
  - bdw5204 3y ago
    How is this any different from the current economy where great companies are frequently going bust because of Wall Street strip mining? One prominent example is a company called Sears which was Amazon before Amazon. Why is General Electric so uncompetitive these days? Why are Dodge and Chrysler now owned by a subsidiary of an Italian company headquartered in Amsterdam? Also, it is the neoliberal economics of the past 30-40 years that has "entrenched monopolies and accelerated consolidation of wealth". Just look at the FAANG companies, how they turned their CEOs into the first ever trillionaires and how they manipulated the tech labor market in ways that have been long term detrimental to workers. The current economic system also destroys loyalty and motivation on the part of workers because promotions are earned by getting a new job elsewhere rather than by merit. This means being good at interviewing not good at the job. I think it's beyond obvious how demoralizing that is for morale in the workforce, at least once workers realize that they have no job security and that there's usually no point or reward to working harder than bare minimum. Job security and valuing retention over poaching the shiny object from your competitor means loyal employees whose incentives are aligned with the employer. It's also bizarre to me how people are unaware that the system I'm describing actually existed during the most prosperous time in American history: the post war boom. Its unraveling boosted short term profits at the expense of the long term. But now we are living in the long term and the bill for decades of neoliberalism is coming due so we can all observe firsthand just how "desirable" its results are in the present catastrophically bad economy.
j45 3y ago
Um.. being aligned with career security is nothing new, if anything it's gotten much worse. Since most content creators dont' work on improving to the level they need to a handout would probably disable and undermine them more than not. Maybe a partial grant or stipend to support them in their off hours after whatever their existing work is could be something to look at. Still, it likely needs to be something There are so many areas other than social media to earn an income with content online.
philipkglass 3y ago
When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it. People struggling to pay the bills couldn't afford to be on the old Web. There were as many (or more) desperately poor people in the world 30 years ago, but they were too poor to get online at all. The needed hardware and service were expensive, and online stuff was unimportant to everyday life. So the early Web was dominated by university students and people with middle class careers at established institutions. Today it's a lot less expensive and a lot more universal to communicate electronically. Many desperate scrabblers now use electronic communications in hopes of making money -- whether it's offshore scammers trying to defraud American retirees or "mom bloggers" enticing you to click on their unoriginal and unneeded "awesome diaper brands" article. In absolute terms there are still a lot of people who don't need to make money from writing and therefore write things that are as interesting and commercially unmotivated as the best of the 1990s Web. A couple of examples that frequently show up on HN: Ken Shirriff's blog https://www.righto.com/ https://www.righto.com/ Daniel Lemire's blog https://lemire.me/blog/ https://lemire.me/blog/ There are also some bloggers and substack writers who do get income from writing, but write about topics that are sufficiently far removed from product placement that their writings remain lucid, engaging, and untainted by desperation. A couple of examples: Bret Devereaux's blog "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry" https://acoup.blog/ https://acoup.blog/ Hannah Ritchie's substack "Sustainability by numbers" https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/about https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/about There's still more good writing published on the Web than there are hours in the day to read it all. The thing that's harder now than in the 1990s is filtering out the commercially motivated writing. That's one of the things that keeps bringing me back to HN -- discovering interesting writers who aren't making "content" as a substrate for ads/promotions. (And yes, there's a lot of commercially motivated content here too, but that's not the part that keeps bringing me back.)
ryandrake 3y ago
> When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Hasn't this been the case for most of history? "The Arts" were historically disproportionately populated by aristocrats, their families, the idle wealthy, and people who could afford to dabble and create and not worry about their art bringing in money. Only very recently has this idea taken hold that it should be possible for any old person to create art and have that somehow finance his or her life. Not saying one is better than the other, but I think making a real living from art is a relatively recent invention.
- soco 3y ago
  Actually artists did make a living from art, they were just a few and under the protection of those with big wealth. Now everybody and their mother wants to be an artist, and for what is worth, many more can do it - it's just the definition of "artist" kinda switched from "lives from art" to "creates art" because we can finally have that time and resources to do it. And then some compare themselves to the old artists and thinks why shouldn't we live from art too - forgetting the amount of networking and ass-kissing a medieval artist had to do to earn a living at the court. So what is really new is the concept "doing art for art's sake but expecting to get paid".
notacoward 3y ago
> their entire industries have gone online, or in many cases, been destroyed by the tech industry itself Interesting point. It makes me think of what happened to typesetters (including my mother) when desktop publishing came along. It was a bloodbath. Everyone was suddenly creating their own reports and newsletters, usually doing a terrible job, instead of paying professionals to do it right. Which is fine, actually, but it did lead to a lot of those skilled professionals losing their livelihoods. A few figured out ways to make it, either as a boutique business catering to those who still wanted work done to traditional standards or by teaching others how to do it themselves better, but most ended up leaving the profession. This is what's happening to a lot of artists, musicians, essayists, and others right now - even more so with "AI" everywhere. Lots of people unable to make a living with their hard-won skills, and insult added to injury as they have to watch others do those same things poorly. And programmers, just you wait until your livelihood consists of rescuing projects that went south because someone insisted on having ChatGPT write it instead of a professional human. For a fraction of what you used to make. I'm sure each and every one of you thinks you'll be one of the winners, still getting paid top dollar to do innovative work, but most of you are wrong. You'll probably get left high and dry just like most of your colleagues, and - unlike the typesetting example - it will mostly be our own collective fault. "Enshittification" already means something else, so we need a new term for when technology both drives people out of work and heralds a massive decline in median work-product quality. (So it's not just "disruption" which has become a word used mostly by tools anyway). Amateurization? Tyrofication?
jaggs 3y ago
>It makes me wonder if a sort of "basic income for Internet creators" would work. It did, for a while. It was called AdSense. And it was wonderful. Then the greed set in, the SEO farms took over, and here we are. It took a few decades, but that's the story.
JohnFen 3y ago
> the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. And a huge number of people weren't (depending on when in internet history we're talking about). The thing is that it doesn't actually cost much to make a website. High schoolers were doing it with allowance money and still can. I don't think the underlying issue is that people can't afford to put stuff on the web. I think the underlying issue is that people discovered they can make money putting stuff on the web. So the web has become primarily a marketplace of sorts, much like cable TV. That's what I think is the root cause of why the internet has become shit. Trying to make money is a powerful driver toward mediocrity, because you're going to want to maximize your customer base.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it." No bogus distinction between "developers" and "users". No so-called "tech" companies acting as middlemen, calling their commercial surveillance "services". The word "monetize" is not one I recall seeing on the early internet. The internet was once thought as a medium that could be used to sell widgets,^1 not as a medium to provide free "services" that are a front for commercial surveillance. People will pay for widgets. No one thinks, "How do I monetize selling widgets?" People will generally not pay for what today's "developers" are creating. Hence the question, "How do I monetize it?" Easy, just ruin the internet by selling people out to advertisers. Until it collapses under the weight of all the garbage. Perhaps someone might try to argue that people in the early days were just not thinking creatively and "innovating", and that today, they are. Yeah, right. Having lived through those days, what I saw was nerds who failed, and failed again, to find a business model, something they could produce that people would pay for. Eventually they gave up and sold out to advertising, which no one on the internet ever liked at all. Now people think this is a "business model" and represents "innovation". To me, nerds today actually seem less creative and less innovative because generally they all do the same thing: sell out to advertising and conduct surveillance. 1. Not that I am a fan of the company and what they have done to internet commerce, but Amazon has done quite well selling widgets.
barfbagginus 3y ago
I would rather have an Internet where I don't hear anything from anyone trying to monetize my attention. The current Internet hides those people - who I assure you still exist - who are trying to share knowledge for free.
oliwarner 3y ago
I think you're right for the wrong reason. I don't think it's because people do and don't have preexisting employment, it's because people feel they can become "creators". The metrics have turned from hits to followers, to enable a constant stream of monetised opinion and product placement. I'll be the last person to say they shouldn't be paid for their work, but I think it has hurt our collective creativity that we focus so hard on how to become a celebrity and sell our audience to advertisers. I miss the days of relative anonymity on New grounds. I guess that has moved to Roblox but even that's poisoned by cash.

jjmarr 3y ago

> It makes me wonder if a sort of "basic income for Internet creators" would work. Instead of individuals trying to optimize their content for maximum income, it would instead work like this: if the group determines that you make great content, you get a small stipend monthly. There are no other expectations or optimization requirements, merely that you continue making the content I think you invented Patreon.

keiferski 3y ago
Yeah, but Patreon is still beholden to the individual-market optimizer model. I'm talking about a group, a collective, that deliberately funds stuff that is merely good content. Maybe a collective Patreon-like "guild" would be a starting point.
- CactusOnFire 3y ago
  The politics of who does vs doesn't make the cut sounds difficult to manage. I think an individualist model makes sense, or barring that, a group Patreon (i.e. a music label instead of an individual band).
  - keiferski 3y ago
    It would be difficult to manage, but not impossible. Certainly if you have a strong organizational culture and know what your org values. Like universities, for example. At least in the past. Otherwise you’re just dependent on the popularity of the market, which I don’t think is a great thing all of the time. There are a lot of things I’d enjoy reading or writing that have zero monetary value and thus are strongly incentivized against existing.
    - greenavocado 3y ago
      You just discovered what a corporation is. Corporations have "boards" that decide what is "good" and can invest in those things to develop them and sell them or give them away with approval from this board. The corporation receives funding from customers and investors to keep going.
      - keiferski 3y ago
        I guess? But clearly this corporate model isn’t really being used to make the kind of content people wish existed.
        greenavocado 3y ago
        The main roadblock for content creators is the distribution channels. Content creators require attention. Attention is the hardest thing to obtain. TikTok broke through and stole lots of attention away from YouTube. Content creators aren't able to grow a massive following of their own because of the discoverability crisis on the Internet. Google and many other platforms are putting up high wall prisons (I refuse to called them "walled gardens") to hold on to user attention as tightly as possible.
- sharkjacobs 3y ago
  Either you're inventing reddit-but-each-upvote-is-worth-a-fraction-of-a-cent, or there is some sort of select professional board who is responsible for deciding what is "good content" on behalf of the public. Sort of like national public arts grants, or maybe public broadcasters like the BBC. Right? Or are you imagining some third model
  - sharkjacobs 3y ago
    the thing about "basic income" is that it's basic. It's unconditional. It's a an efficient way for a government to guarantee a minimum quality of life for its citizens. As soon as you tie it to producing "good content" or something, the whole thing becomes about meeting that criteria. Ad views are a gameable target. So are upvotes. So is board approval.
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      Yep the whole thing would quickly devolve into arguments over what is good or whether some irrelevant personal idiosyncracy of the creator should prohibit him getting paid for his otherwise "good" content.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    I’m imagining something like this: a rich guy who likes art takes a million dollars and makes an organization that funds people writing about art, paying them $1,000 a month. (Exact amounts don’t matter.) He sets up a list of values and rules that are broad enough to not be limiting and specific enough to get what he wants. He personally picks the first 100 people involved, and then all further decision making involves him + those 100 people + new entrants. The specific setup could be debated but the basic idea is just that the group funds things that match its values.
    - drekipus 3y ago
      This already happens, somewhat in richer circles. Frank Zappa has a quote about this very thing actually.
    - 3y ago
- stackskipton 3y ago
  There are groups you can fund on Patreon that have a bunch of creators under them. Second Wind which is spin off old Escapist staff is one. The issue with these groups if there is a popular person in them, they will generally leave the group and start their own thing because they can get more money. So you will still have issues where top tier creators want all money and don't want to "subsidize" smaller creators.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > I'm talking about a group, a collective, that deliberately funds stuff that is merely good content This is a newspaper or think tank. It can be donor, ad or reader (i.e. paywall) supported.
- jjmarr 3y ago
  You can donate to non-profit museums or art galleries where you live, and they will use that money to fund artists. edit: or you can donate to a non-profit newspaper, or think tank, or any other type of institution that deals with this. I'm not trying to be condescending, but the question to be asked shouldn't be "why doesn't this exist". It should be "why aren't more people aware of and using this?"
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  That sounds like an artist's network. A lot of podcasts have networks, there are some webcomic networks, etc. The problem with networks, much like with insurance networks (but kind of backwards), is making sure that the superstars that hit it big and bring in a disproportionate amount of the money don't spin off into a solo career to keep more of the money themselves, while also not making them feel trapped and resentful in a contract jail.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    I think that the content from the “old web” that people miss isn’t really superstar quality. It’s more like an extensive nerdy guide on a niche topic. So I wouldn’t anticipate this being a huge issue.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  > I'm talking about a group, a collective, that deliberately funds stuff that is merely good content Why does this group need to be different from the general Youtube (insert any platform here) audience that votes with their views/likes/subscribes ? What am I missing?
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Because the YouTuber watcher votes for MrBeast, not for the niche intellectual content that populated the early web. The point is to decouple quality content creation from the ad-matrix and fund it in other ways.
person23 3y ago
[flagged]
- Solvency 3y ago
  [flagged]
chx 3y ago
Except Patreon banned a lot of Ukranian vloggers and did not ban Russian propaganda. For example, WarGonzo is still on it (just checked) and Ayder Muzhdabayev and Serhii Sternenko are not. Check https://youtu.be/91US4DNcBGw https://youtu.be/91US4DNcBGw as well. This made me delete my Patreon.

cogman10 3y ago

Wouldn't work, because it's chasing after the dollar that has ultimately destroyed the internet. Because the internet means income for so many people, doing whatever it takes to get your website to the top of search results matters a lot. That means that the hobbyist making a website cannot compete with the businesses who's lifeblood depend on edging those hobbyist pages off the search results. What made the old internet so great was your search in lycos or yahoo could pull up a result from hobbyists across the internet with a good chance of being just an honest info dump by a fan. That became an issue when the ad money started entering the mix. All the sudden we got things like ask jeeves and expert sex change edging out good content for their garbage "Hey, we also searched those keywords" landing pages. Google's initial value ad was the fact that it gave you good results that avoided these tactics. I'm afraid the old internet is simply gone forever. There will always be someone willing to break the system to get on top so they can make the money.

082349872349872 3y ago
I can do without "creators" at all, which I guess explains why my online time these days is mostly spent scurrying around the wainscoting of the web: HN, marginalia, etc. "Away to the hills, to the caves, to the rocks Ere I own an usurper, I'll couch with the fox" These days you can even find some seriously deep cuts, like some hobbyist from the XII explaining how to calculate with the newfangled arabic numerals: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84900936/f151.item https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84900936/f151.item
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
Maybe we just need a search engine more dedicated to surfacing the hobbyists over the spammers.
- cogman10 3y ago
  And maybe we just need a new social media platform geared towards the youth ;) Unless the search engine aggressively curates it's target pages, I can't see how it wouldn't end up falling down the same trap as search engines of the past. Much like all social media sites end up overran by grandmas.

alabhyajindal 3y ago

Exactly. Seeing a lot of articles on HN reminiscing the old internet and it's getting tiring.

bdw5204 3y ago

I think a better solution would be to bring back strong career security. Allowing companies to increase their profits by laying off workers is a policy choice. As is allowing companies to outsource jobs to cheaper jurisdictions. There is no law of nature that says that the US has to allow free trade to impoverish and dispossess its middle class so that its upper class can get even wealthier.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
Not allowing companies to lay off workers who aren't doing productive work would put them at a competitive disadvantage against foreign competitors or new companies, and then they still lose their jobs when the company goes bust. Not allowing new companies to compete with existing ones would entrench monopolies and accelerate concentration of wealth. Neither of these are desirable results.
- bdw5204 3y ago
  How is this any different from the current economy where great companies are frequently going bust because of Wall Street strip mining? One prominent example is a company called Sears which was Amazon before Amazon. Why is General Electric so uncompetitive these days? Why are Dodge and Chrysler now owned by a subsidiary of an Italian company headquartered in Amsterdam? Also, it is the neoliberal economics of the past 30-40 years that has "entrenched monopolies and accelerated consolidation of wealth". Just look at the FAANG companies, how they turned their CEOs into the first ever trillionaires and how they manipulated the tech labor market in ways that have been long term detrimental to workers. The current economic system also destroys loyalty and motivation on the part of workers because promotions are earned by getting a new job elsewhere rather than by merit. This means being good at interviewing not good at the job. I think it's beyond obvious how demoralizing that is for morale in the workforce, at least once workers realize that they have no job security and that there's usually no point or reward to working harder than bare minimum. Job security and valuing retention over poaching the shiny object from your competitor means loyal employees whose incentives are aligned with the employer. It's also bizarre to me how people are unaware that the system I'm describing actually existed during the most prosperous time in American history: the post war boom. Its unraveling boosted short term profits at the expense of the long term. But now we are living in the long term and the bill for decades of neoliberalism is coming due so we can all observe firsthand just how "desirable" its results are in the present catastrophically bad economy.

j45 3y ago

Um.. being aligned with career security is nothing new, if anything it's gotten much worse. Since most content creators dont' work on improving to the level they need to a handout would probably disable and undermine them more than not. Maybe a partial grant or stipend to support them in their off hours after whatever their existing work is could be something to look at. Still, it likely needs to be something There are so many areas other than social media to earn an income with content online.

philipkglass 3y ago

When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it. People struggling to pay the bills couldn't afford to be on the old Web. There were as many (or more) desperately poor people in the world 30 years ago, but they were too poor to get online at all. The needed hardware and service were expensive, and online stuff was unimportant to everyday life. So the early Web was dominated by university students and people with middle class careers at established institutions. Today it's a lot less expensive and a lot more universal to communicate electronically. Many desperate scrabblers now use electronic communications in hopes of making money -- whether it's offshore scammers trying to defraud American retirees or "mom bloggers" enticing you to click on their unoriginal and unneeded "awesome diaper brands" article. In absolute terms there are still a lot of people who don't need to make money from writing and therefore write things that are as interesting and commercially unmotivated as the best of the 1990s Web. A couple of examples that frequently show up on HN: Ken Shirriff's blog https://www.righto.com/ https://www.righto.com/ Daniel Lemire's blog https://lemire.me/blog/ https://lemire.me/blog/ There are also some bloggers and substack writers who do get income from writing, but write about topics that are sufficiently far removed from product placement that their writings remain lucid, engaging, and untainted by desperation. A couple of examples: Bret Devereaux's blog "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry" https://acoup.blog/ https://acoup.blog/ Hannah Ritchie's substack "Sustainability by numbers" https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/about https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/about There's still more good writing published on the Web than there are hours in the day to read it all. The thing that's harder now than in the 1990s is filtering out the commercially motivated writing. That's one of the things that keeps bringing me back to HN -- discovering interesting writers who aren't making "content" as a substrate for ads/promotions. (And yes, there's a lot of commercially motivated content here too, but that's not the part that keeps bringing me back.)

ryandrake 3y ago

> When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Hasn't this been the case for most of history? "The Arts" were historically disproportionately populated by aristocrats, their families, the idle wealthy, and people who could afford to dabble and create and not worry about their art bringing in money. Only very recently has this idea taken hold that it should be possible for any old person to create art and have that somehow finance his or her life. Not saying one is better than the other, but I think making a real living from art is a relatively recent invention.

soco 3y ago
Actually artists did make a living from art, they were just a few and under the protection of those with big wealth. Now everybody and their mother wants to be an artist, and for what is worth, many more can do it - it's just the definition of "artist" kinda switched from "lives from art" to "creates art" because we can finally have that time and resources to do it. And then some compare themselves to the old artists and thinks why shouldn't we live from art too - forgetting the amount of networking and ass-kissing a medieval artist had to do to earn a living at the court. So what is really new is the concept "doing art for art's sake but expecting to get paid".

notacoward 3y ago

> their entire industries have gone online, or in many cases, been destroyed by the tech industry itself Interesting point. It makes me think of what happened to typesetters (including my mother) when desktop publishing came along. It was a bloodbath. Everyone was suddenly creating their own reports and newsletters, usually doing a terrible job, instead of paying professionals to do it right. Which is fine, actually, but it did lead to a lot of those skilled professionals losing their livelihoods. A few figured out ways to make it, either as a boutique business catering to those who still wanted work done to traditional standards or by teaching others how to do it themselves better, but most ended up leaving the profession. This is what's happening to a lot of artists, musicians, essayists, and others right now - even more so with "AI" everywhere. Lots of people unable to make a living with their hard-won skills, and insult added to injury as they have to watch others do those same things poorly. And programmers, just you wait until your livelihood consists of rescuing projects that went south because someone insisted on having ChatGPT write it instead of a professional human. For a fraction of what you used to make. I'm sure each and every one of you thinks you'll be one of the winners, still getting paid top dollar to do innovative work, but most of you are wrong. You'll probably get left high and dry just like most of your colleagues, and - unlike the typesetting example - it will mostly be our own collective fault. "Enshittification" already means something else, so we need a new term for when technology both drives people out of work and heralds a massive decline in median work-product quality. (So it's not just "disruption" which has become a word used mostly by tools anyway). Amateurization? Tyrofication?

jaggs 3y ago

>It makes me wonder if a sort of "basic income for Internet creators" would work. It did, for a while. It was called AdSense. And it was wonderful. Then the greed set in, the SEO farms took over, and here we are. It took a few decades, but that's the story.

JohnFen 3y ago

> the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. And a huge number of people weren't (depending on when in internet history we're talking about). The thing is that it doesn't actually cost much to make a website. High schoolers were doing it with allowance money and still can. I don't think the underlying issue is that people can't afford to put stuff on the web. I think the underlying issue is that people discovered they can make money putting stuff on the web. So the web has become primarily a marketplace of sorts, much like cable TV. That's what I think is the root cause of why the internet has become shit. Trying to make money is a powerful driver toward mediocrity, because you're going to want to maximize your customer base.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it." No bogus distinction between "developers" and "users". No so-called "tech" companies acting as middlemen, calling their commercial surveillance "services". The word "monetize" is not one I recall seeing on the early internet. The internet was once thought as a medium that could be used to sell widgets,^1 not as a medium to provide free "services" that are a front for commercial surveillance. People will pay for widgets. No one thinks, "How do I monetize selling widgets?" People will generally not pay for what today's "developers" are creating. Hence the question, "How do I monetize it?" Easy, just ruin the internet by selling people out to advertisers. Until it collapses under the weight of all the garbage. Perhaps someone might try to argue that people in the early days were just not thinking creatively and "innovating", and that today, they are. Yeah, right. Having lived through those days, what I saw was nerds who failed, and failed again, to find a business model, something they could produce that people would pay for. Eventually they gave up and sold out to advertising, which no one on the internet ever liked at all. Now people think this is a "business model" and represents "innovation". To me, nerds today actually seem less creative and less innovative because generally they all do the same thing: sell out to advertising and conduct surveillance. 1. Not that I am a fan of the company and what they have done to internet commerce, but Amazon has done quite well selling widgets.

barfbagginus 3y ago

I would rather have an Internet where I don't hear anything from anyone trying to monetize my attention. The current Internet hides those people - who I assure you still exist - who are trying to share knowledge for free.

oliwarner 3y ago

I think you're right for the wrong reason. I don't think it's because people do and don't have preexisting employment, it's because people feel they can become "creators". The metrics have turned from hits to followers, to enable a constant stream of monetised opinion and product placement. I'll be the last person to say they shouldn't be paid for their work, but I think it has hurt our collective creativity that we focus so hard on how to become a celebrity and sell our audience to advertisers. I miss the days of relative anonymity on New grounds. I guess that has moved to Roblox but even that's poisoned by cash.