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Kinda funny to read all these comments looking at a single-person's effort and going "he, he, he cannot win against the adtech billions and their addiction mach

Kinda funny to read all these comments looking at a single-person's effort and going "he, he, he cannot win against the adtech billions and their addiction machines". What Pixelfed (and Loops and various other still half baked initiatives) prove is that there is an entire space of very interesting applications that are possible with the technologies of here and now. Bluesky was better resourced but essentially still in the same dwarf category versus big adtech. Some people will take these proof-of-principle efforts to heart and build a beautiful future while others will cling on milking the totally broken paradigms of yesteryear.

alecco 2y ago
Professional content creators need to get paid reasonably. AFAIR Tik Tok spent a lot of money getting good content creators in the beginning. YouTube and X pay peanuts but due to scale it's a significant amount of peanuts for top earners. The platform is important but the content creators and the viewers are 10x more important.
- angrygoat 2y ago
  Some extension of the Patreon model onto decentralised social media could work. I pay a few bucks a month to the creators of webcomics and other content that I enjoy, just because it's the right thing to do, and I dunno, it makes me feel more connected to these people that I've never met but who bring me some joy?
  - rglullis 2y ago
    The amount of people like you is nowhere near enough to develop and maintain a robust economy.
    - VHRanger 2y ago
      So what? Not every product needs to be at the 100m user scale to be a success. The nice thing about this era for a creator is that having 10,000 dedicated fans is enough. Dedicated fans will happily monetize on you. 100,000 low engagement fans won't make nearly as much.
      - rglullis 2y ago
        > Not every product needs to be at the 100m user scale to be a success. But the absolute overwhelming majority of content creators are putting all the work with the hopes of achieving that scale of success. > The nice thing about this era for a creator is that having 10,000 dedicated fans is enough. For one creator, yes. For a whole economy that can bring billions of dollars per year, you will need to have a much larger consumer base, and you'll need to have a substantial part of them willing to support a lot more than a handful of creators.
    - jeroenhd 2y ago
      I disagree. YouTube is absolutely filled to the brim with Patreon supported content. Even large channels need significant alternative income streams like merch to exist in the way they do, and they're still profitable. A sliver of the viewership cares enough to pay, but when you reach hundreds of thousands of people, you don't need all of them to pay for you to be profitable. We used to have a "pay for what you consume" economy and I don't see why that suddenly can't exist anymore.
      - 9283409232 2y ago
        Without knowing what percentage of revenue is from Youtube and what percentage is from Patreon, this isn't really important. You can get 10% of income from Patreon and still be considered "Patreon supported." > We used to have a "pay for what you consume" economy and I don't see why that suddenly can't exist anymore. Piracy and entitlement.
      - rglullis 2y ago
        > YouTube is absolutely filled to the brim with Patreon supported content. Tell me how many of these content creators are exclusively supported by Patreon. Also, ask any of these content creators (that supposedly are able to be sustained by Patreon) if they would be willing to move away from YouTube and into another platform like Peertube. None of them will. Some of them won't mind creating the Peertube channel and distributing their content as well, but no one will leave YouTube, because they all know that YouTube is still the platform that enables all the economy to exist. I'm not saying this because I don't like the Patreon model. Quite the opposite. [0]. But it's hard to argue with numbers, and the numbers are just not in favor of this idea that a whole industry can be supported by a minority of enthusiasts. [0] : https://blog.communick.com/communick-collective-a-zero-commission-crowdfunding-platform-to-support-content-creators-in-the-fediverse/ https://blog.communick.com/communick-collective-a-zero-commi...
        einsteinx2 2y ago
        Regarding your first question, it’s a bit of a trick question because no one is purposefully demonetizing their videos even though the ad revenue is relatively low, but Adrian Black from Adrian’s Digital Basement came to mind as someone that is supported almost exclusively by Patreon. He never does sponsors on his channel, only makes money from Patreon and a bit from ad revenue from YouTube, and specifically thanks to his Patreon income was able to quit his tech job and go full time in YouTube. LGR is another one that comes to mind that I think barely ever does sponsors and makes most of his income from Patreon. I’m sure there are many others as well.
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  Tiktok paid peanuts but had a large enough audience to get lots of attention. The money on Tiktok comes from brands being marketed (often via product placement), not necessarily from Tiktok itself. Tiktok does pay people, but not nearly as much as you'd think with how many influences are out there. I don't think the existing product placement industry will suffer on alternatives, but Tiktok has what its competition lacks: an excellent algorithm, not bogged down by any ethics, optimised for pulling in as many people as possible. Filtering out ugly or disabled people and algorithmically censoring speech all across the spectrum would never pass on any open system, but it has worked wonders on Tiktok. That's why I don't think open source alternatives will ever be popular, even if they find themselves backed by investors and paying out creators: they're still too ethical to be profitable.
- moron4hire 2y ago
  Maybe professional content creators don't need to exist at all. I look at people like PewDiePie and MrBeast and I wonder if society really needs anything that makes those men possible.
  - blharr 2y ago
    As much criticism as they get, they are at least less opaque than the big corporate media guys who are making movies, TV, and news.
    - moron4hire 2y ago
      I think this is a large part of the problem with YouTube and the like. People seem to act like, because this isn't traditional media, then the creators must be more like us than them. Maybe that was true at the dawn of YouTube 15 - 20 years ago. But it's definitely not true now. The way these content creators work is a huge apparatus of media production indistinguishable from any other production studio in traditional media. Indeed, maybe if them even aspire to get into traditional media. Well, until they find out the raw deal the distribution companies want to give them, that is.
  - rglullis 2y ago
    You are looking at the extreme end of the bell curve and think they represent the totality of the group. For every Mr. Beast, there are tens of thousands of other people with 10k-1M subscribers who produce valuable content which would never exist if it were not for the already existing audience.
    - moron4hire 2y ago
      I chose those names because they are a pure distillation of "everything that is wrong..." But it's pretty easy to find lots of issues that wouldn't exist if "digital media content creator" wasn't a job that kids today are aspiring to. Look at video thumbnails and "YouTube face". Look at how many videos are feature-film length ordeals: there is no way everyone is actively watching all that content; they're all putting it in their TVs in the background. Look at how every video on YouTube is at least 10 minutes long: that happens because it means the video will get a second ad spot. If it comes down to making a 9.5 minute video it a 10.1 minute one, well, nobody is going to pass up stretching an extra 36 seconds out of the B-roll. If you're an advertiser, it's gotta be driving you mad. All this micro-optimizing for length to get ad spots has to be really destroying their click through rates. Which is fine with me, actually, cry me big crocodile years. But it's probably also why they've spent so much effort on in-video sponsorships. Now that really pisses me off, because I'm paying YouTube for an ad-free experience and yet YouTube turns a blind eye to its content creators circumventing my preference. But all of this would go away if YouTube didn't pay content creators. "Why shouldn't people get paid for their work?" They should. But posting to YouTube shouldn't be someone's job. Because the remuneration system is perverse.
- agnishom 2y ago
  Leaving Tiktok and YouTube aside, viewing posters on Twitter as "content creators" would be dangerous. We don't want to judge tweets by the metric of whether they are the most engaging
  - grajaganDev 2y ago
    Posters on X are "content creators" and get paid based on impressions.
- pjc50 2y ago
  Twitter never paid top tweeters. The X attempt at payouts seems to be yet another component of making the platform worse. Mind you, Vine collapsed over a dispute with its creators. People happily post on Bluesky or HN for free. I think paid content is a different genre, and we need to figure out how to get people to pay for it other than advertising.
  - moron4hire 2y ago
    > People happily post on Bluesky or HN for free. I think paid content is a different genre, and we need to figure out how to get people to pay for it other than advertising. I think this is so important and something that gets missed a lot, especially any place that is even tangentially related to "entrepreneurship" like HN. "Why wouldn't you try to monetize every single aspect of your life?" I do wood working as a hobby. People keep asking me if I have plans to sell my stuff, then they look at me weird when I say no. Some of them even look like they've been personally insulted, which is weird considering I'm the one being pressed. I do it because I can make nice things for my family and friends, unique things that have a lot of meaning to them. It's not possible to monetize what I do because what I do only works because it's not monetizable.
  - ekzyis 2y ago
    > we need to figure out how to get people to pay for it other than advertising. Sorry for the plug, but the two of us at https://stacker.news/ https://stacker.news/ managed to get users to pay for content (even though it’s free to read) by assigning a cost to creating content and sharing the revenue with both consumers and creators using the bitcoin lightning network for microtransactions. Let me know if you're interested and would like to hear more. Anything related to bitcoin tends to get heavily downvoted here, so I don't want to spend too much time explaining it.
lucianbr 2y ago
I don't see anyone actually saying the "he, he," part. It's more "oof,". Nobody's happy with the situation, but it is what it is. > Some people will [...] build a beautiful future Hope so. I'm sure TikTok and Facebook won't live forever. But I think they will not be overtaken by "tiktok, only distributed". Horses were not made obsolete by mechanical horses and all that. But that's just nitpicking.
- openrisk 2y ago
  The "distributed" part is still to pinned down anyway (which architecture scales and which not, under what definition of "scaling"). The discussions between activitypub and atproto protocol folks are informative in this respect. But there is another non-trivial difference: these are open source projects. The real Achilles heel is having a viable business model. But all business models, whether good or bad are inventions. Unless we think predatory adtech is the end of human ingenuity people will come up with ways.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    > The real Achilles heel is having a viable business model. Other activitypub projects are going well with a small minority of people donating the server costs, and project leaders just keeping those servers there because they want it.
- randysalami 2y ago
  I’m working on it.. to me distributed or decentralized or anything tech-y doesn’t matter. What matters is the masses, the common man and at the end of the day, the masses don’t care or know about that stuff. They want to be entertained and maybe they even want to help. Create simple but powerful user experiences. Make them addictive and productive and then you have something that can actually help society
mkoubaa 2y ago
[flagged]
- hnpolicestate 2y ago
  I don't know about that. More like a Democrat Twitter clone. Liberals prefer echo chambers. And I don't mean that as a slur. They don't want to see or engage with content they disagree with. Bluesky fills that need for millions.
  - blharr 2y ago
    This isn't a liberal thing. There are tons of conservative echo chambers. Twitter has just now pushed away the liberal echo chamber side of things, so liberals are leaving. Everyone makes their own Twitter communities depending on what pages they follow.
  - sbooher 2y ago
    We’ve incrementally changed the definition of a social network, and hardly anyone notices, or cares. X is now a place where you can post the most anodyne comment like “Happy Saturday folks” and immediately get 50 trolls arguing that it’s NOT a happy Saturday, and BTW you’re an ugly BIT*H. Every one of Elons’ 50 daily posts will be boosted and you have to see them. Your feed is now filled with right-wing content 24/7 from anyone who paid for a checkmark. From the moment you log into the system, you may be in fight-or-flight mode, and every single interaction is a potential argument. That’s our collective definition of a social network now, and if you want to opt out of that, you’re in a “liberal echo chamber”. No, Bluesky lets folks actually use a network as before - finding interesting content, connecting with others, and yes, having civil disagreements. The change is that trolls whose only purpose in life is to find as many people as possible to argue with and shout at, can now be blocked from a user’s feed. It’s not a new innovation - it’s the way it used to work.
    - 2024user 2y ago
      Did Twitter/X remove blocking or something?
pinoy420 2y ago
[flagged]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

alecco 2y ago

Professional content creators need to get paid reasonably. AFAIR Tik Tok spent a lot of money getting good content creators in the beginning. YouTube and X pay peanuts but due to scale it's a significant amount of peanuts for top earners. The platform is important but the content creators and the viewers are 10x more important.

angrygoat 2y ago
Some extension of the Patreon model onto decentralised social media could work. I pay a few bucks a month to the creators of webcomics and other content that I enjoy, just because it's the right thing to do, and I dunno, it makes me feel more connected to these people that I've never met but who bring me some joy?
- rglullis 2y ago
  The amount of people like you is nowhere near enough to develop and maintain a robust economy.
  - VHRanger 2y ago
    So what? Not every product needs to be at the 100m user scale to be a success. The nice thing about this era for a creator is that having 10,000 dedicated fans is enough. Dedicated fans will happily monetize on you. 100,000 low engagement fans won't make nearly as much.
    - rglullis 2y ago
      > Not every product needs to be at the 100m user scale to be a success. But the absolute overwhelming majority of content creators are putting all the work with the hopes of achieving that scale of success. > The nice thing about this era for a creator is that having 10,000 dedicated fans is enough. For one creator, yes. For a whole economy that can bring billions of dollars per year, you will need to have a much larger consumer base, and you'll need to have a substantial part of them willing to support a lot more than a handful of creators.
  - jeroenhd 2y ago
    I disagree. YouTube is absolutely filled to the brim with Patreon supported content. Even large channels need significant alternative income streams like merch to exist in the way they do, and they're still profitable. A sliver of the viewership cares enough to pay, but when you reach hundreds of thousands of people, you don't need all of them to pay for you to be profitable. We used to have a "pay for what you consume" economy and I don't see why that suddenly can't exist anymore.
    - 9283409232 2y ago
      Without knowing what percentage of revenue is from Youtube and what percentage is from Patreon, this isn't really important. You can get 10% of income from Patreon and still be considered "Patreon supported." > We used to have a "pay for what you consume" economy and I don't see why that suddenly can't exist anymore. Piracy and entitlement.
    - rglullis 2y ago
      > YouTube is absolutely filled to the brim with Patreon supported content. Tell me how many of these content creators are exclusively supported by Patreon. Also, ask any of these content creators (that supposedly are able to be sustained by Patreon) if they would be willing to move away from YouTube and into another platform like Peertube. None of them will. Some of them won't mind creating the Peertube channel and distributing their content as well, but no one will leave YouTube, because they all know that YouTube is still the platform that enables all the economy to exist. I'm not saying this because I don't like the Patreon model. Quite the opposite. [0]. But it's hard to argue with numbers, and the numbers are just not in favor of this idea that a whole industry can be supported by a minority of enthusiasts. [0] : https://blog.communick.com/communick-collective-a-zero-commission-crowdfunding-platform-to-support-content-creators-in-the-fediverse/ https://blog.communick.com/communick-collective-a-zero-commi...
      - einsteinx2 2y ago
        Regarding your first question, it’s a bit of a trick question because no one is purposefully demonetizing their videos even though the ad revenue is relatively low, but Adrian Black from Adrian’s Digital Basement came to mind as someone that is supported almost exclusively by Patreon. He never does sponsors on his channel, only makes money from Patreon and a bit from ad revenue from YouTube, and specifically thanks to his Patreon income was able to quit his tech job and go full time in YouTube. LGR is another one that comes to mind that I think barely ever does sponsors and makes most of his income from Patreon. I’m sure there are many others as well.
jeroenhd 2y ago
Tiktok paid peanuts but had a large enough audience to get lots of attention. The money on Tiktok comes from brands being marketed (often via product placement), not necessarily from Tiktok itself. Tiktok does pay people, but not nearly as much as you'd think with how many influences are out there. I don't think the existing product placement industry will suffer on alternatives, but Tiktok has what its competition lacks: an excellent algorithm, not bogged down by any ethics, optimised for pulling in as many people as possible. Filtering out ugly or disabled people and algorithmically censoring speech all across the spectrum would never pass on any open system, but it has worked wonders on Tiktok. That's why I don't think open source alternatives will ever be popular, even if they find themselves backed by investors and paying out creators: they're still too ethical to be profitable.
moron4hire 2y ago
Maybe professional content creators don't need to exist at all. I look at people like PewDiePie and MrBeast and I wonder if society really needs anything that makes those men possible.
- blharr 2y ago
  As much criticism as they get, they are at least less opaque than the big corporate media guys who are making movies, TV, and news.
  - moron4hire 2y ago
    I think this is a large part of the problem with YouTube and the like. People seem to act like, because this isn't traditional media, then the creators must be more like us than them. Maybe that was true at the dawn of YouTube 15 - 20 years ago. But it's definitely not true now. The way these content creators work is a huge apparatus of media production indistinguishable from any other production studio in traditional media. Indeed, maybe if them even aspire to get into traditional media. Well, until they find out the raw deal the distribution companies want to give them, that is.
- rglullis 2y ago
  You are looking at the extreme end of the bell curve and think they represent the totality of the group. For every Mr. Beast, there are tens of thousands of other people with 10k-1M subscribers who produce valuable content which would never exist if it were not for the already existing audience.
  - moron4hire 2y ago
    I chose those names because they are a pure distillation of "everything that is wrong..." But it's pretty easy to find lots of issues that wouldn't exist if "digital media content creator" wasn't a job that kids today are aspiring to. Look at video thumbnails and "YouTube face". Look at how many videos are feature-film length ordeals: there is no way everyone is actively watching all that content; they're all putting it in their TVs in the background. Look at how every video on YouTube is at least 10 minutes long: that happens because it means the video will get a second ad spot. If it comes down to making a 9.5 minute video it a 10.1 minute one, well, nobody is going to pass up stretching an extra 36 seconds out of the B-roll. If you're an advertiser, it's gotta be driving you mad. All this micro-optimizing for length to get ad spots has to be really destroying their click through rates. Which is fine with me, actually, cry me big crocodile years. But it's probably also why they've spent so much effort on in-video sponsorships. Now that really pisses me off, because I'm paying YouTube for an ad-free experience and yet YouTube turns a blind eye to its content creators circumventing my preference. But all of this would go away if YouTube didn't pay content creators. "Why shouldn't people get paid for their work?" They should. But posting to YouTube shouldn't be someone's job. Because the remuneration system is perverse.
agnishom 2y ago
Leaving Tiktok and YouTube aside, viewing posters on Twitter as "content creators" would be dangerous. We don't want to judge tweets by the metric of whether they are the most engaging
- grajaganDev 2y ago
  Posters on X are "content creators" and get paid based on impressions.
pjc50 2y ago
Twitter never paid top tweeters. The X attempt at payouts seems to be yet another component of making the platform worse. Mind you, Vine collapsed over a dispute with its creators. People happily post on Bluesky or HN for free. I think paid content is a different genre, and we need to figure out how to get people to pay for it other than advertising.
- moron4hire 2y ago
  > People happily post on Bluesky or HN for free. I think paid content is a different genre, and we need to figure out how to get people to pay for it other than advertising. I think this is so important and something that gets missed a lot, especially any place that is even tangentially related to "entrepreneurship" like HN. "Why wouldn't you try to monetize every single aspect of your life?" I do wood working as a hobby. People keep asking me if I have plans to sell my stuff, then they look at me weird when I say no. Some of them even look like they've been personally insulted, which is weird considering I'm the one being pressed. I do it because I can make nice things for my family and friends, unique things that have a lot of meaning to them. It's not possible to monetize what I do because what I do only works because it's not monetizable.
- ekzyis 2y ago
  > we need to figure out how to get people to pay for it other than advertising. Sorry for the plug, but the two of us at https://stacker.news/ https://stacker.news/ managed to get users to pay for content (even though it’s free to read) by assigning a cost to creating content and sharing the revenue with both consumers and creators using the bitcoin lightning network for microtransactions. Let me know if you're interested and would like to hear more. Anything related to bitcoin tends to get heavily downvoted here, so I don't want to spend too much time explaining it.

lucianbr 2y ago

I don't see anyone actually saying the "he, he," part. It's more "oof,". Nobody's happy with the situation, but it is what it is. > Some people will [...] build a beautiful future Hope so. I'm sure TikTok and Facebook won't live forever. But I think they will not be overtaken by "tiktok, only distributed". Horses were not made obsolete by mechanical horses and all that. But that's just nitpicking.

openrisk 2y ago
The "distributed" part is still to pinned down anyway (which architecture scales and which not, under what definition of "scaling"). The discussions between activitypub and atproto protocol folks are informative in this respect. But there is another non-trivial difference: these are open source projects. The real Achilles heel is having a viable business model. But all business models, whether good or bad are inventions. Unless we think predatory adtech is the end of human ingenuity people will come up with ways.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  > The real Achilles heel is having a viable business model. Other activitypub projects are going well with a small minority of people donating the server costs, and project leaders just keeping those servers there because they want it.
randysalami 2y ago
I’m working on it.. to me distributed or decentralized or anything tech-y doesn’t matter. What matters is the masses, the common man and at the end of the day, the masses don’t care or know about that stuff. They want to be entertained and maybe they even want to help. Create simple but powerful user experiences. Make them addictive and productive and then you have something that can actually help society

mkoubaa 2y ago

[flagged]

hnpolicestate 2y ago
I don't know about that. More like a Democrat Twitter clone. Liberals prefer echo chambers. And I don't mean that as a slur. They don't want to see or engage with content they disagree with. Bluesky fills that need for millions.
- blharr 2y ago
  This isn't a liberal thing. There are tons of conservative echo chambers. Twitter has just now pushed away the liberal echo chamber side of things, so liberals are leaving. Everyone makes their own Twitter communities depending on what pages they follow.
- sbooher 2y ago
  We’ve incrementally changed the definition of a social network, and hardly anyone notices, or cares. X is now a place where you can post the most anodyne comment like “Happy Saturday folks” and immediately get 50 trolls arguing that it’s NOT a happy Saturday, and BTW you’re an ugly BIT*H. Every one of Elons’ 50 daily posts will be boosted and you have to see them. Your feed is now filled with right-wing content 24/7 from anyone who paid for a checkmark. From the moment you log into the system, you may be in fight-or-flight mode, and every single interaction is a potential argument. That’s our collective definition of a social network now, and if you want to opt out of that, you’re in a “liberal echo chamber”. No, Bluesky lets folks actually use a network as before - finding interesting content, connecting with others, and yes, having civil disagreements. The change is that trolls whose only purpose in life is to find as many people as possible to argue with and shout at, can now be blocked from a user’s feed. It’s not a new innovation - it’s the way it used to work.
  - 2024user 2y ago
    Did Twitter/X remove blocking or something?

pinoy420 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]