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> "I keep this blog for me to write, not necessarily for others to read." This is now to me the "old school" internet creator attitude (that I still possess).

> "I keep this blog for me to write, not necessarily for others to read." This is now to me the "old school" internet creator attitude (that I still possess). I don't blog as much any more but do create content elsewhere - a lot of it is for my own enjoyment and creative outlet, to blow off steam, whatever - the fact that other people may want to watch it is secondary. I do try to do things people want, but only if I want to do it. The only reason I highlight this is that the up and coming generations absolutely do not see content creation in the same way. I got in an absurd argument with an early 20 something on a social media platform about how annoying ads were that were disguised as content. The response was overwhelmingly "Well, how else do you expect content creators to make a living?" I do not disagree that creators should be able to monetize their content however they please, but the fact that people see that as the end and only goal of content creation is baffling to me and almost certainly making it worse. This same person tried to tell me it's been the same way since the earliest days of youtube - which they would have been in diapers around that time - is absolutely not true. The idea of content creation as a full time career is relatively new, and I hate it. The worst part is if you don't participate in the type of obnoxious engagement hacking or buried ads that these "professional" creators do, the algorithms punish you for it.

Kye 2y ago
It's the flip side of every other employment possibility having such poor prospects. Do you spend 4 years getting a degree no one will hire for so you can bag groceries to pay off debt, or do you bag groceries to live while trying to break through as a creator? For most people, there aren't many options available. All the best opportunities are in cities no one can afford to live in anymore.
- jollyllama 2y ago
  Still, it's surprising that they can't even conceive of doing anything without profit motive as an incentive. This isn't the first time I've heard of this kind of inter-generational dialogue. Perhaps Millennials and Gen-X are uniquely idealistic (or naïve) generations.
  - Kye 2y ago
    Let's not confuse what they do for money with what they do for fun. For example: A lot of happy programmers can't conceive of doing it for fun: they log in, do a good job, log out, go tend to their sheep and work on their woodshed. You might not have the full picture of someone's life from a context-constrained conversation. There are things I'm good at that I tend to only want to do with a profit motive. I have plenty of unmonetized hobbies though.
    - jollyllama 2y ago
      > A lot of happy programmers can't conceive of doing it for fun I don't think that's true. I think even people who fit that description are aware of others who find it fun. I guess what I was saying is, it doesn't even occur to them that someone would do something absent any profit motive.
  - JohnMakin 2y ago
    The "Hawk Tuah" girl is a perfect example to me. She had a funny moment, and I think 15-20 years ago it probably would have just been a funny meme for a few years and a "oh you're that girl from the meme" at parties for her entire 20's. Like that's exactly how that would have played out. Now she quit her job, has sponsorships, got a major podcast deal - over a single viral moment. It's nutty to me, personally, but people seem to see this as perfectly normal.
    - jollyllama 2y ago
      Interesting point. I'm not sure what her plan for her life was, but I could understand her making that decision if the rather explicit nature of her comments precluded it. Maybe she felt she had no choice but to own it.
    - doctorwho42 2y ago
      Anything to distract from the dystopia we live in. Ironically what you describe sounds like that season 1 of black mirror episode
    - 2y ago
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I always struggle to understand this sentiment. There seems to be a huge labor shortage, particularly for physical and skilled labor. Auto mechanics change 120/hr for labor, someone recently quoted me 40k to spend a week landscaping my residential back yard, and an arborist wanted 3k for a single day of chainsaw work pruning a big tree.
  - DowagerDave 2y ago
    none of those things are accessible to someone who has say, a 4-yr fine arts degree. They're also extremes and not typical, unless your car is at the dealer, your backyard is on a make-over show, or that tree is hanging over your house & powerlines
    - Kye 2y ago
      Yep. Once you have any level of education past high school, lots of the better jobs just won't hire you. They assume you're biding your time until a better job comes by and any time or money spent training you will be wasted. The "labor shortage" is a fantasy created by people with jobs to offer having unrealistic expectations.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        Surely someone with a college degree that wants to be a plumber can simply not disclose their degree?
        Kye 2y ago
        Oh, they'll know. All that book learnin' changes you. With life and experience and life experience, you can stop coming off as a stuck-up out of touch asshole to people doing this kind of work. My entire generation got endless refrains of the message that these are the kinds of jobs you fail into if you don't get a degree. That doesn't break easily. It seems like the next crowd gets similar messages.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  You bag groceries and spend your time looking to break through in the industry your degree is in. You are infinitely more likely to be successful finding a real job than wasting your time and energy hoping to win the influencer lottery. If you wanted to be a content creator what the hell did you get a degree for?
xhrpost 2y ago
Agreed. I think part of this shift came with the transition to use real names online everywhere. Now what you put out there really matters because you might be judged for it years later. So if you're limited in your creativity, why bother creating something you don't enjoy if it doesn't have the potential to make you money? Personally I'm keeping my real name Gmail but I've created a no-name account on Proton and am starting to use that for certain platforms. I want to try and get back to something like the days of creating random logos in Gimp and posting them to my Geocities page that no one viewed other than a friend or two and I didn't care.
ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
> content creation I seriously hate the term "content" used for "creative output". It is a terrible, derogatory word, that makes me sad. Content is only there to have something to sell, to fill the blank space around ads, the actual content of the content doesn't matter. That people refer to themselves as "content creators" is a sign that they see the value of their creative output only to make money.
- doctorwho42 2y ago
  Welcome to the hyper capitalist world that has been created over the past 60 years. This is the result of always needed growth in your economic system.
  - anthonypasq 2y ago
    this seems like a complete non-sequitur to me
    - giardini 2y ago
      But now you've added a sequitur! (It's OK to leave a thread dangling in the wind.)
    - alexyz12 2y ago
      seems very relevant to me. Isn't it capitalism that reduces our value to $s? And thus our art is only valuable as content?
      - shafoshaf 2y ago
        I think this is a common misconception of the comparison between "capitalism" and other forms of economic distribution. It's not capitalism that equates everything to dollars, it is how the universe works. This was the beauty of Karl Marx's thinking. He postulated that the best way to measure value is in the amount of human labor that goes into the output. However, once you have a medium to equate the value of a new chair into labor then I can come up with an another transformation to equate that labor into some defined quantity of glass beads. It turns out that choosing Labor as the "value" is completely arbitrary, and so dollars (or yen or gold) works just as well as a medium for conversion.
blackbrokkoli 2y ago
Genuine question: If you write only for yourself, what motivates you to actually finish, and more importantly, polish a post? I write for myself all the time, in private: I have a journal, a paper notebook, thousands of notes in Obsidian. Yet doing a blog post feels like a massive undertaking every single time, especially the later writing and editing: explaining stuff that is obvious to me and no one else, replacing idiosyncratic abbreviations, fixing formatting issues, fixing blogging engine or hosting stuff. I think I struggle with these parts because doing those tasks doesn't benefit me very much. So how do you do these things within the framework of writing for oneself? Any takes on this?
- vanjajaja1 2y ago
  just dont do any of that. write at the level you want to write at and publish what you have. its a kind of self esteem work to say “what i write for myself is fine to make public” and then being public also inspires slightly higher quality
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  I don’t write too much anymore, one of my blogs got a lot more exposure and attention than I was comfortable with and people online in general are weirdo freaks and annoying to deal with. I guess I didn’t fuss too much with that stuff, the quality was likely poorer than it could have been. Same with my video stuff, I just don’t care that much if it’s polished. Audience feedback sometimes helps but isn’t that motivating to me.
  - DowagerDave 2y ago
    >> and people online in general are weirdo freaks and annoying to deal with. This is definitely the current internet and not the typical experience back when blogging was very popular. It's too easy to access and produce low-quality contributions today, which (ironically?) is something that blogs countered and also probably led to their decline.
    - JohnMakin 2y ago
dandigangi 2y ago
Agreed! I find myself writing or other content that I don't share around. Just sits on my site. Helped me by getting it out of my head and if someone stumbles on it, great. If not, all good!
jhp123 2y ago
The idea of content creation as a full time career is literally ancient, e.g. musicians have been paid for thousands of years. The Napster-era ideology that "information wants to be free" is the outlier.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  This is a dishonest framing, I think. The scale and type of content, especially the way it is expected to be consumed, on top of a hyper-monetized ad framework was not a thing in ancient times. I also think very few people picked up a lute in those days with the idea that they were only going to play if it made them money (artists have for much of modern history notoriously made a poor living). The point I was making was not that an artist making a living from their art is a new thing, no one is making that point.
cookiengineer 2y ago
Quality content gets punished. Investigative journalism went down the drain for the same reasons. Clickbait content is so much cheaper to produce and has the same effect, because you can produce hundreds of clickbait articles in the same time. Soon every video has to have Mr.Beast's ADHD inducing video cutstyle because otherwise the algorithms will punish you for producing too slow content. I miss the old days where I could just watch a Carmack interview for 4 hours straight and listen to their insights without getting a burnout after 15 minutes of video time.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  It always seems to me there’s room for a platform like the “old” youtube that doesn’t behave this way? Or maybe youtube just has too much critical mass for that ever to work.
  - cookiengineer 2y ago
    A lot of producers that want to make longer content about a topic at some point dual upload or switch to nebula, as far as I can tell in my interest niches. Not sure if there are other platforms. (I also like to watch a lot of those oldskool slow nature documentaries while coding. In Germany, arte, NDR and WDR have some nice ones in their media platforms.)
tdeck 2y ago
I really feel this with podcasts; everyone seems like they need to make a buck now. Before about 2015 there were so many great podcasts that people did for fun or because they wanted to get a message out. Slowly, one by one, they started adding sponsorships for Blue Apron and NatureBox and SquareSpace (these were the VPMs of 2015). Now even the most niche podcast has algorithmic ads. I frequently hear creators say that these ads make very little money but I guess the creators think they're losing out by not including them. I remember listening to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe back then and thinking "everyone else is adding ads but I bet this one never will, they've been doing it ad-free for like a decade". Then a year later they had ads. It's just sad to think of what we've lost.
- I-M-S 2y ago
  Most podcasts offer an ad-free version if you throw 2 or 3 bucks per month to them.
nineteen999 2y ago
> The idea of content creation as a full time career is relatively new, and I hate it. I do too, but IMHO unfortunately us older generations have a lot to answer for when it comes to this. My teenage daughter plus all of her friends all want to be content creators. It's the 21st century equivalent of becoming a pop star or being a TV personality. As an industry we've automated away a lot of the jobs that these kids otherwise could have had, handed them a bunch of shitty tools and algorithms and shown them that this is a way to make money. I don't find their attitude all that surprising.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  And it's not really new. Being a YouTuber or TikToker was obviously not possible before those platforms existed, but people were musicians, actors, or other sorts of performers, or wrote stuff that they tried to get published, it's all the same drive. Some wanted to do it to become a star and get paid, others did it for the love of the craft. The internet is a new avenue for this, that's all.
  - soxletor 2y ago
    It is strange people don't understand this. The only thing that changes in time is the medium. 100 years ago, young people wanted to be painters. 50 years ago, young people wanted to form a rock band. 2024, young people want to be tiktok stars. Some are more delusional than others about it but that never changes either.
- ghaff 2y ago
  >21st century equivalent of becoming a pop star or being a TV personality Which were always lottery professions at best. Being influencers/YouTube stars/etc. may seem more accessible these days but it's probably mostly an illusion. There are (mostly) plenty of jobs but most of them are probably pretty unglamorous.
  - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
    I think both of these things are true: * It's more accessible to be an influencer today than a pop star 20 years ago * Becoming an influencer is a lot like being a lottery winner. Bands on the radio had massive audiences. A decent Youtuber is getting 10k views on their video, which is a much smaller piece of the pie than any band that aired on the radio in the early 2000s. But for every Youtuber with 10k views there's hundreds, maybe thousands, of Youtubers with videos in the single digit of views.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
I write stuff that I'd like to read. I've found that most others, don't want to read it. It seems that it needs to be short-form video, if I want to get eyeballs. Meh, whatevs. I still do it. Making decent video is a a lot more work than writing. https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany
brightball 2y ago
I write when I've had something on my mind for a while and I need to get it out of my head. Also helps me to work through it in more detail. I've had a few things get picked up here that got some good attention but many people complain that what I write is too long. It's usually too long because I'm trying to complete the thought for my own sake. One of these days, I could honestly see writing a book because those long posts are usually shortened as much as I can.
pbreit 2y ago
I cannot believe that Dave Winer is still at it after 30 years: http://scripting.com http://scripting.com
AlienRobot 2y ago
I realized I had become a boomer when I saw people using the term "Youtuber" as a normal job description which, through all my life, I had thought of as a "joke" profession like "Influencer." Now they're all real, and I'm officially boomed. Youtuber, Influencer, Content Creator, Streamer, even VTuber. I'm sure the world of professional TikTokers is also upon us.
paradox460 2y ago
I feel much the same way, to the extent that I only very recently added analytics to my blog, via plausible
ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> I do not disagree that creators should be able to monetize their content however they please, but the fact that people see that as the end and only goal of content creation is baffling to me and almost certainly making it worse. It is 110% making it worse, but I feel the need to point out this attitude is not coming from nowhere. We're getting squeezed on every side, everything in life is more expensive year over year, wages are stagnant at best and falling at worst. Doing shit just for the sake of doing it is increasingly becoming a luxury the young can't afford. It isn't that nobody wants to, it's that they literally can't justify spending time on things they find interesting, fulfilling or otherwise beneficial without some kind of monetary gain at least possible in the future because they're struggling to afford the basics of life, let alone whatever they might need to make or do whatever they might want to. I don't mean to come down on you in particular, I just see this attitude everywhere, and it's frankly dismissive as fuck of the genuine economic vice that the young find themselves in right now. You want people to do stuff without an eye directly towards how it can make them money? Cool, odds are damn good a whole lot of the people you're complaining about would very much love the freedom to do something that doesn't make money without feeling like they're screwing themselves possibly into going hungry tonight. Make the world you want to see.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> the fact that other people may want to watch it is secondary I don't do much social networking (deleted FB, Twitter) but I still have an IG account because I like seeing pictures of interesting places, so I mostly follow thru-hikers, world travelers, cyclists, etc. I've seen the transition where some of these world travelers just start posting content for themselves, and others just happen to enjoy them. Then they slowly get more viewers because whatever they're doing is interesting, and eventually it reaches a point I guess to where money can be made, then it switches to content creator mode. And then it's not about sharing what they're doing or their interests with others, it's about views and catering to the viewers. It's not wrong or bad--I guess it's nice they can fund their lifestyle through that, but it becomes "ad-funded entertainment", which is a huge turn-off for me, that's when I unfollow. If I find an account interesting, the first thing I do is look at the follower count. If it's a high number, I don't follow the account because it's already clear what that account is.
chiefalchemist 2y ago
Something has gone wrong when we use and accept uning "content" as a euphemism for what is actually advertising. We're not longer citizens, mearly consumers.

Kye 2y ago

It's the flip side of every other employment possibility having such poor prospects. Do you spend 4 years getting a degree no one will hire for so you can bag groceries to pay off debt, or do you bag groceries to live while trying to break through as a creator? For most people, there aren't many options available. All the best opportunities are in cities no one can afford to live in anymore.

jollyllama 2y ago
Still, it's surprising that they can't even conceive of doing anything without profit motive as an incentive. This isn't the first time I've heard of this kind of inter-generational dialogue. Perhaps Millennials and Gen-X are uniquely idealistic (or naïve) generations.
- Kye 2y ago
  Let's not confuse what they do for money with what they do for fun. For example: A lot of happy programmers can't conceive of doing it for fun: they log in, do a good job, log out, go tend to their sheep and work on their woodshed. You might not have the full picture of someone's life from a context-constrained conversation. There are things I'm good at that I tend to only want to do with a profit motive. I have plenty of unmonetized hobbies though.
  - jollyllama 2y ago
    > A lot of happy programmers can't conceive of doing it for fun I don't think that's true. I think even people who fit that description are aware of others who find it fun. I guess what I was saying is, it doesn't even occur to them that someone would do something absent any profit motive.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  The "Hawk Tuah" girl is a perfect example to me. She had a funny moment, and I think 15-20 years ago it probably would have just been a funny meme for a few years and a "oh you're that girl from the meme" at parties for her entire 20's. Like that's exactly how that would have played out. Now she quit her job, has sponsorships, got a major podcast deal - over a single viral moment. It's nutty to me, personally, but people seem to see this as perfectly normal.
  - jollyllama 2y ago
    Interesting point. I'm not sure what her plan for her life was, but I could understand her making that decision if the rather explicit nature of her comments precluded it. Maybe she felt she had no choice but to own it.
  - doctorwho42 2y ago
    Anything to distract from the dystopia we live in. Ironically what you describe sounds like that season 1 of black mirror episode
  - 2y ago
s1artibartfast 2y ago
I always struggle to understand this sentiment. There seems to be a huge labor shortage, particularly for physical and skilled labor. Auto mechanics change 120/hr for labor, someone recently quoted me 40k to spend a week landscaping my residential back yard, and an arborist wanted 3k for a single day of chainsaw work pruning a big tree.
- DowagerDave 2y ago
  none of those things are accessible to someone who has say, a 4-yr fine arts degree. They're also extremes and not typical, unless your car is at the dealer, your backyard is on a make-over show, or that tree is hanging over your house & powerlines
  - Kye 2y ago
    Yep. Once you have any level of education past high school, lots of the better jobs just won't hire you. They assume you're biding your time until a better job comes by and any time or money spent training you will be wasted. The "labor shortage" is a fantasy created by people with jobs to offer having unrealistic expectations.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Surely someone with a college degree that wants to be a plumber can simply not disclose their degree?
      - Kye 2y ago
        Oh, they'll know. All that book learnin' changes you. With life and experience and life experience, you can stop coming off as a stuck-up out of touch asshole to people doing this kind of work. My entire generation got endless refrains of the message that these are the kinds of jobs you fail into if you don't get a degree. That doesn't break easily. It seems like the next crowd gets similar messages.
bongodongobob 2y ago
You bag groceries and spend your time looking to break through in the industry your degree is in. You are infinitely more likely to be successful finding a real job than wasting your time and energy hoping to win the influencer lottery. If you wanted to be a content creator what the hell did you get a degree for?

xhrpost 2y ago

Agreed. I think part of this shift came with the transition to use real names online everywhere. Now what you put out there really matters because you might be judged for it years later. So if you're limited in your creativity, why bother creating something you don't enjoy if it doesn't have the potential to make you money? Personally I'm keeping my real name Gmail but I've created a no-name account on Proton and am starting to use that for certain platforms. I want to try and get back to something like the days of creating random logos in Gimp and posting them to my Geocities page that no one viewed other than a friend or two and I didn't care.

ReleaseCandidat 2y ago

> content creation I seriously hate the term "content" used for "creative output". It is a terrible, derogatory word, that makes me sad. Content is only there to have something to sell, to fill the blank space around ads, the actual content of the content doesn't matter. That people refer to themselves as "content creators" is a sign that they see the value of their creative output only to make money.

doctorwho42 2y ago
Welcome to the hyper capitalist world that has been created over the past 60 years. This is the result of always needed growth in your economic system.
- anthonypasq 2y ago
  this seems like a complete non-sequitur to me
  - giardini 2y ago
    But now you've added a sequitur! (It's OK to leave a thread dangling in the wind.)
  - alexyz12 2y ago
    seems very relevant to me. Isn't it capitalism that reduces our value to $s? And thus our art is only valuable as content?
    - shafoshaf 2y ago
      I think this is a common misconception of the comparison between "capitalism" and other forms of economic distribution. It's not capitalism that equates everything to dollars, it is how the universe works. This was the beauty of Karl Marx's thinking. He postulated that the best way to measure value is in the amount of human labor that goes into the output. However, once you have a medium to equate the value of a new chair into labor then I can come up with an another transformation to equate that labor into some defined quantity of glass beads. It turns out that choosing Labor as the "value" is completely arbitrary, and so dollars (or yen or gold) works just as well as a medium for conversion.

blackbrokkoli 2y ago

Genuine question: If you write only for yourself, what motivates you to actually finish, and more importantly, polish a post? I write for myself all the time, in private: I have a journal, a paper notebook, thousands of notes in Obsidian. Yet doing a blog post feels like a massive undertaking every single time, especially the later writing and editing: explaining stuff that is obvious to me and no one else, replacing idiosyncratic abbreviations, fixing formatting issues, fixing blogging engine or hosting stuff. I think I struggle with these parts because doing those tasks doesn't benefit me very much. So how do you do these things within the framework of writing for oneself? Any takes on this?

vanjajaja1 2y ago
just dont do any of that. write at the level you want to write at and publish what you have. its a kind of self esteem work to say “what i write for myself is fine to make public” and then being public also inspires slightly higher quality
JohnMakin 2y ago
I don’t write too much anymore, one of my blogs got a lot more exposure and attention than I was comfortable with and people online in general are weirdo freaks and annoying to deal with. I guess I didn’t fuss too much with that stuff, the quality was likely poorer than it could have been. Same with my video stuff, I just don’t care that much if it’s polished. Audience feedback sometimes helps but isn’t that motivating to me.
- DowagerDave 2y ago
  >> and people online in general are weirdo freaks and annoying to deal with. This is definitely the current internet and not the typical experience back when blogging was very popular. It's too easy to access and produce low-quality contributions today, which (ironically?) is something that blogs countered and also probably led to their decline.
  - JohnMakin 2y ago

dandigangi 2y ago

Agreed! I find myself writing or other content that I don't share around. Just sits on my site. Helped me by getting it out of my head and if someone stumbles on it, great. If not, all good!

jhp123 2y ago

The idea of content creation as a full time career is literally ancient, e.g. musicians have been paid for thousands of years. The Napster-era ideology that "information wants to be free" is the outlier.

JohnMakin 2y ago
This is a dishonest framing, I think. The scale and type of content, especially the way it is expected to be consumed, on top of a hyper-monetized ad framework was not a thing in ancient times. I also think very few people picked up a lute in those days with the idea that they were only going to play if it made them money (artists have for much of modern history notoriously made a poor living). The point I was making was not that an artist making a living from their art is a new thing, no one is making that point.

cookiengineer 2y ago

Quality content gets punished. Investigative journalism went down the drain for the same reasons. Clickbait content is so much cheaper to produce and has the same effect, because you can produce hundreds of clickbait articles in the same time. Soon every video has to have Mr.Beast's ADHD inducing video cutstyle because otherwise the algorithms will punish you for producing too slow content. I miss the old days where I could just watch a Carmack interview for 4 hours straight and listen to their insights without getting a burnout after 15 minutes of video time.

JohnMakin 2y ago
It always seems to me there’s room for a platform like the “old” youtube that doesn’t behave this way? Or maybe youtube just has too much critical mass for that ever to work.
- cookiengineer 2y ago
  A lot of producers that want to make longer content about a topic at some point dual upload or switch to nebula, as far as I can tell in my interest niches. Not sure if there are other platforms. (I also like to watch a lot of those oldskool slow nature documentaries while coding. In Germany, arte, NDR and WDR have some nice ones in their media platforms.)

tdeck 2y ago

I really feel this with podcasts; everyone seems like they need to make a buck now. Before about 2015 there were so many great podcasts that people did for fun or because they wanted to get a message out. Slowly, one by one, they started adding sponsorships for Blue Apron and NatureBox and SquareSpace (these were the VPMs of 2015). Now even the most niche podcast has algorithmic ads. I frequently hear creators say that these ads make very little money but I guess the creators think they're losing out by not including them. I remember listening to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe back then and thinking "everyone else is adding ads but I bet this one never will, they've been doing it ad-free for like a decade". Then a year later they had ads. It's just sad to think of what we've lost.

I-M-S 2y ago
Most podcasts offer an ad-free version if you throw 2 or 3 bucks per month to them.

nineteen999 2y ago

> The idea of content creation as a full time career is relatively new, and I hate it. I do too, but IMHO unfortunately us older generations have a lot to answer for when it comes to this. My teenage daughter plus all of her friends all want to be content creators. It's the 21st century equivalent of becoming a pop star or being a TV personality. As an industry we've automated away a lot of the jobs that these kids otherwise could have had, handed them a bunch of shitty tools and algorithms and shown them that this is a way to make money. I don't find their attitude all that surprising.

SoftTalker 2y ago
And it's not really new. Being a YouTuber or TikToker was obviously not possible before those platforms existed, but people were musicians, actors, or other sorts of performers, or wrote stuff that they tried to get published, it's all the same drive. Some wanted to do it to become a star and get paid, others did it for the love of the craft. The internet is a new avenue for this, that's all.
- soxletor 2y ago
  It is strange people don't understand this. The only thing that changes in time is the medium. 100 years ago, young people wanted to be painters. 50 years ago, young people wanted to form a rock band. 2024, young people want to be tiktok stars. Some are more delusional than others about it but that never changes either.
ghaff 2y ago
>21st century equivalent of becoming a pop star or being a TV personality Which were always lottery professions at best. Being influencers/YouTube stars/etc. may seem more accessible these days but it's probably mostly an illusion. There are (mostly) plenty of jobs but most of them are probably pretty unglamorous.
- Karrot_Kream 2y ago
  I think both of these things are true: * It's more accessible to be an influencer today than a pop star 20 years ago * Becoming an influencer is a lot like being a lottery winner. Bands on the radio had massive audiences. A decent Youtuber is getting 10k views on their video, which is a much smaller piece of the pie than any band that aired on the radio in the early 2000s. But for every Youtuber with 10k views there's hundreds, maybe thousands, of Youtubers with videos in the single digit of views.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

I write stuff that I'd like to read. I've found that most others, don't want to read it. It seems that it needs to be short-form video, if I want to get eyeballs. Meh, whatevs. I still do it. Making decent video is a a lot more work than writing. https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany

brightball 2y ago

I write when I've had something on my mind for a while and I need to get it out of my head. Also helps me to work through it in more detail. I've had a few things get picked up here that got some good attention but many people complain that what I write is too long. It's usually too long because I'm trying to complete the thought for my own sake. One of these days, I could honestly see writing a book because those long posts are usually shortened as much as I can.

pbreit 2y ago

I cannot believe that Dave Winer is still at it after 30 years: http://scripting.com http://scripting.com

AlienRobot 2y ago

I realized I had become a boomer when I saw people using the term "Youtuber" as a normal job description which, through all my life, I had thought of as a "joke" profession like "Influencer." Now they're all real, and I'm officially boomed. Youtuber, Influencer, Content Creator, Streamer, even VTuber. I'm sure the world of professional TikTokers is also upon us.

paradox460 2y ago

I feel much the same way, to the extent that I only very recently added analytics to my blog, via plausible

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

> I do not disagree that creators should be able to monetize their content however they please, but the fact that people see that as the end and only goal of content creation is baffling to me and almost certainly making it worse. It is 110% making it worse, but I feel the need to point out this attitude is not coming from nowhere. We're getting squeezed on every side, everything in life is more expensive year over year, wages are stagnant at best and falling at worst. Doing shit just for the sake of doing it is increasingly becoming a luxury the young can't afford. It isn't that nobody wants to, it's that they literally can't justify spending time on things they find interesting, fulfilling or otherwise beneficial without some kind of monetary gain at least possible in the future because they're struggling to afford the basics of life, let alone whatever they might need to make or do whatever they might want to. I don't mean to come down on you in particular, I just see this attitude everywhere, and it's frankly dismissive as fuck of the genuine economic vice that the young find themselves in right now. You want people to do stuff without an eye directly towards how it can make them money? Cool, odds are damn good a whole lot of the people you're complaining about would very much love the freedom to do something that doesn't make money without feeling like they're screwing themselves possibly into going hungry tonight. Make the world you want to see.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

> the fact that other people may want to watch it is secondary I don't do much social networking (deleted FB, Twitter) but I still have an IG account because I like seeing pictures of interesting places, so I mostly follow thru-hikers, world travelers, cyclists, etc. I've seen the transition where some of these world travelers just start posting content for themselves, and others just happen to enjoy them. Then they slowly get more viewers because whatever they're doing is interesting, and eventually it reaches a point I guess to where money can be made, then it switches to content creator mode. And then it's not about sharing what they're doing or their interests with others, it's about views and catering to the viewers. It's not wrong or bad--I guess it's nice they can fund their lifestyle through that, but it becomes "ad-funded entertainment", which is a huge turn-off for me, that's when I unfollow. If I find an account interesting, the first thing I do is look at the follower count. If it's a high number, I don't follow the account because it's already clear what that account is.

chiefalchemist 2y ago

Something has gone wrong when we use and accept uning "content" as a euphemism for what is actually advertising. We're not longer citizens, mearly consumers.