They need to talk about the network effect, and where the power is centered here. Hint - its not with the content creators, nor the users. Its the platform. Its the rent-seeking behavior on the part of the platforms that causes every entry in this space to rise when there's investment money, and then fall when they have to start making the money back and implement creator and user unfriendly mechanisms. Then the content creators have to replatform, which can lose them much of their audience.
We can break the cycle with self-hosted platform-agnostic tools. Most everything these platforms do is available off the shelf - the differentiations don't actually matter. The content creators aren't being given an audience, they build audiences for the platform. Everything the platform does once it has to start making money is in service to the platform and the investors, not the "workers", or the users.
> Most everything these platforms do is available off the shelf - the differentiations don't actually matter
Except, often critically, the very network effect that those platforms help foster.
Try self-hosting a viral video and see how far it gets you. It's much harder to break through. This very discussion is taking place on a platform that focuses a network effect for a very specific but sizeable audience. How would it take place otherwise?
As someone who has worked in the arts for over a decade, I see no path forward besides worker ownership of these platforms. Every other arrangement leads to race-to-the-bottom for the labor on these platforms.
Maybe the ongoing collapse of American cities as places that are unaffordable for anyone other that the ultra-wealthy will push software engineers in this direction. The housing crisis in San Francisco alone should demonstrate that class interests of white collar employees are more aligned with those of the workers on the platforms they create then those of their current owners.
I think that’s a severe underestimation of the impact of a popular and easy place of congregation. The center of power being the platform is how things work in the digital realm and the in-person realm.
As a random example, if someone is shopping for a steak, they normally would go to a market, grocery store, or butcher shop in a popular plaza near their home. If you’re in America, most likely that steak is sourced from a farm owned by a large corporation. You could go to local butcher who sources their meat from local small farms and add 30 minutes to your shopping, but it doesn’t have potatoes and green beans you'd like on the side of that steak dinner. Some people will absolutely make that trip, but not nearly as much as if that butcher got a shop in the popular plaza near everything else, owned by a commercial real estate company.
While the physical shopping example obviously has more friction than the digital example, the value is still high to provide a centrally located platform for consumers, creators and businesses to congregate. The power is rightfully focused on those that provide that platform.
I certainly agree with you about the value of self-hosting for creators. Own your own domain(s) and build your own online properties.
I did see an interesting an interesting article about hosting your own content and then use shadow copies, linking back to original, on Medium, etc. I never tried it though, and I am not convinced it would be a good idea.
> We can break the cycle with self-hosted platform-agnostic tools. Most everything these platforms do is available off the shelf - the differentiations don't actually matter. The content creators aren't being given an audience, they build audiences for the platform. Everything the platform does once it has to start making money is in service to the platform and the investors, not the "workers", or the users.
Another idea to go with this is giving the followers/subscribers a way to help the content creator that isn't (directly) monetary -- serving as a CDN for their content. I think the tools are actually even all there right now (torrenting, live stream relaying tech, DHTs, etc) -- it's just no one has created a compelling platform that is super easy to use -- I mean like no set up -- Enter your patreon/stripe, click "Stream" and start streaming, tell your followers to download the app.
An app like these, but with as little set up as possible and the right pairing for an easy path to profitability (again, probably just hooking up a stripe/patreon) and the right amount of social features would blow this wide open.
People often talk about the problem with moderation, but people on Twitch solve that mostly by empowering certain members of the audience to be moderators (who are happy to contribute and glad to get some power/special status).
Another problem that often is mentioned is discovery -- how will people find the good content? I think you can leave discovery to other platforms for now or find a way to solve it later -- worst case we can literally re-grow the way the old internet did it -- start with web rings, and scraping. In the extreme case, if discovery becomes such a bad problem, someone will step in and charge for it (whether on the supply or demand side).
As a side note, I almost wrote a rant on HN the other day about the "passion economy" (I believe it was on a article about restaurant), but thought better of it because I just don't think the HN crowd is ready to hear opinions against the current state of the capitalist system since most here are benefitting handily (the same insular view that prevents workers in tech from unionizing). I think it's growing in popularity because people are growing increasingly unsatisfied with their work prospects and are being fed fantasies about how they could succeed in a low-effort second job vaguely related to something they like doing. I think most people trying to become twitch streamers or make it big on youtube or as influencers would stop if their jobs paid them wages that made them feel financially secure. Sure some people would still stream/play/market or whatever, but they'd do it at their own pace and be much less focused on making a profit (and trading away rights/benefits to larger platform companies to do so). The real problem here isn't these companies, it's a unregulated capitalism creating a walking nightmare of "gig"s (whether it's an actual gig economy job or a full time job that pays you gig wages), giving people just enough so they can survive but not enough to thrive -- perfect for picking up another one of the gig economy jobs to try and get there.
Yeah, I’d like to see median earnings numbers here.
Passion is great for hobbies. Passion should not be an ingredient or path to being a good employee or being a good citizen. Rigor yes, dedication, sure. Passion (I.e. suffering as it were), no, no that is that companies who want to milk you tell you, of managers who want to extract more from you and away from work life balance say. Sorry, but no.
Thank you. This is just like YouTuber economics. Sure the top creators in various categories do pretty well, but the vast majority of creators don’t even come close to making a living (and probably not even minimum wage factoring total content creation time). On top of this, sustaining a passion as a business is a fantastic way to burn out. Just look at creators like Every Frame a Painting. Keeping up with audience demands enough to maintain view counts / subscribers / patrons / whatever is hard.
My wife was a freelancer teacher for a few years. Her earnings moved between 'being able to pay rent and little else' to 'not being able to pay the rent'. Not able to see a way forward and with the market getting more crowded, she decided to have a career change.
Now she has a 'boring office job', but at least she gets a predictable salary and career progression. Many times passion alone doesn't pay the bills.
I think “passion” and the rise of startups the past decade are correlated, there is the cult of passion converted into “culture” as a lure. It appeals greatly to younger employees. The economic state and money looking for more money is fuel for the “passion culture lure”.
In my mind "passion" has become synonymous with "marketing" - it matters only when you make it visible, very visible.
Whatever happened to having a calling?
I don't think the economy in this segment is changing drastically. Top handful of rockstars, actors, athletes, soccer players, etc were always compensated very well, while the median ones weren't. Not like you can get a Master in Talk Show Hosting degree and get a more or less predictable career path similar to the engineering/medicine degrees.
Come to think of it, the rise of multiple competing content platforms would actually lower the top performers' revenues due to the audience splintering.
Given that A16Z likely holds some stake in the mentioned businesses, I would treat this as simply another piece of marketing material for some upcoming IPOs.
It's kind of subjective. Decades ago, CEO's made 20:1 compared to workers. That's "compensated very well". Today is 200:1. It's still very well. A whole order of magnitude better.
In developed countries, today's winners win bigger. The losers stagnate. Globally, many have been lifted out of poverty.
The poor in developing countries are doing better. The wealthy are doing better. The middle class is not.
I agree that there is definitely a pareto distribution in earnings—and there probably always has been for creative work. I don't know if this means that there are less people making a living in each respective field. For that, I'd like to see some hard data. How fat is the tail of the power curve, anyway? And how many curves are out there?
God I hate this stuff. It preaches the wrong ideas to people and then screws them up for life.
We need to think less about “the future of work” and think more about “the history of work”.
What people need to embrace is the Discipline Economy. It’s simple. Find something that is of value to society and pays enough, then work everyday to be better and better at it until you reach your maximum potential, and you will be rewarded. No passion required. You just get up and do it, every workday. And at the end of the day, clock out and go do whatever you want.
You don’t need to be doing something you like, you need to be doing something that sustains you. If that also happens to be something you like, then that is a gift, similar to being tall, or smart, or attractive. Life will be easier for you then, but that is not the default. Someone still has to shovel the piles of shit or dig a ditch.
The Passion Economy appeals to people who don’t ask what they can do for society, but rather what society can do for them. It’s selfish, and unsustainable. Passion doesn’t last forever. Discipline does.
I sort of agree with you, we tend to develop passion for things after we achieve a high skill level. That said, it is OK to peruse things that we might be passionate about but not good at. I am not a good musician. After forty years, I mostly gave up on playing the guitar, and took up two easier instruments, didgeridoo and Native American flute. I will never be really good at these instruments either but it felt good when friends asked me to play didgeridoo at their wedding when the bride was walking down the aisle.
I have a keen interest in future society/economy/technology and in a world with guaranteed minimum income, I hope people spend time on niche passion projects and not just binge on Netflix and HBO.
> Find something that is of value to society and pays enough, then work everyday to be better and better at it until you reach your maximum potential, and you will be rewarded.
Unless society changes what it values, at which point you are fucked.
Selecting a few outliers and calling it a “trend” is ridiculous.
Honestly I wish there was a stricter policy on HN for posting corporate content marketing puff pieces. These a16z blog posts do nothing more than hype companies in their portfolio.
Hype... except when their BS is transparent and poorly researched. But hey, at least there are a few interesting discussions spurred on by this non-article.
Well they have to do something to make up for their continued decline in performance. You don't get to stay the industry darling by living on your historical record forever...
This describes how one can use individuality and a platform to provide a labor like podcasting, youtubing, online teaching, etc. It describes how it works and the shape of this industry.
It doesn't go into how feasible making a living income is actually, merely highlights the top earners in specific platforms... Rather suspicious to me.
It's telling that they call out how much money the top earners on Substack and Podia are making, rather than how much the average or median creators on those platforms make. These types of platforms generally end up creating a small number of superstars who earn orders of magnitude more than the average creator, with all other creators getting a relative pittance.
Indeed, another factor to consider is that in a medium like this, "top earner" is going to change constantly. The attention of podcast consumers is going to shift constantly, $50K or $100K in a month hardly guarantees that on a continuing basis.
Anyway, "passion" is usually/often code for "doing what you love instead of being paid", which may be fun but doesn't have a good retirement plan.
it's a classic submarine piece. we know these distributions have tails that are long as hell and the platforms themselves subject to massive first mover advantages.
They start the first paragraph saying "The TOP earning writer here makes X ..." then "The TOP content creator there makes Y ..." The second paragraph says "This is INDICATIVE of ..." How does the logical fallacy here not occur to them? That they use a MAXIMUM to describe a distribution in the way that a person who is not completely out of touch with reality would use a median or mean. Silicon Valley megalomania par excellence.
> The top-earning writer on the paid newsletter platform Substack earns more than $500,000 a year from reader subscriptions.
By contrast, 99.99% of writers earn either nothing or very little from their "passion", because approximately nobody has the time and interest to read all of their stuff. It's a terrible career choice that people should be dissuaded from more actively.
I would imagine it's the same or similar for all other "passion gigs".
The reason that A16z is taking about top earners rather than median is that their audience is the people building the platforms. These people care about the total revenue which you'd expect to be a power law distribution dominated by the top earners, so the max is the most important number.
We should think about what is going to happen to all those people (let's face it, the vast majority) who are not passionate about anything... Or worse; who are simply not quite passionate enough...
Taking into account a competitive global environment with many traditional/productive jobs disappearing and being replaced by a much smaller number of extremely hard-to-get content creator jobs, I don't think it's going to end well. It's starting to look like that Black Mirror episode where people end up living in a box and generaring electricity with their legs.
Then at least you should keep searching for it until you find it or die. There are virtually unlimited thing you can do in life, its unlikely there is nothing one is passionate about.
Anyone know where to hook up technical writing gigs? We dont have stripe in my country so I cant get payouts on medium. I used to write for an Elasticsearch blog. Would love to get paid for technical articles. I got a whole portfolio and plenty of passion.
My hunch is that for the "gig economy" to become anything more than worker exploitation, they will need to be restructured as commons-owned P2P networks where earnings and value are ~equally distributed.
It's absurd for 0.01% of popular, early-adopter creators to be making $millions on these platforms while 99.99% with the same output quality and skills struggle to earn enough to cover a fraction of their living costs.
But of course equal wealth distribution and commons ownership is a blindspot that the Silicon Valley sociopaths will never pursue.
Complete and total nonsense. "Passion" is a buzzword meaning work for free until we deem you worthy of payment - and that time frame keeps getting longer and longer as the race to the bottom in labor keeps happening. NAFTA was a prelude to the internet revolution. Like programming? Well, someone living where rent is a tenth of yours can do it better than you. Enjoy poverty!
Whenever you gauge the performance of any activity, there is a bell curve distribution of ability.
A very small portion become superstars and a majority fall somewhere in the middle, this is a natural phenomena.
What these platforms have allowed to happen is allowed individuals to capture more of the value they individually produce, with the result being these creators with abilities to perform BEYOND the average do much better.
Of course you don't see the natural selection cycle - the fact that many do not perform as well, and need to find some other - low competition - arena to express themselves in. In which they can perform more efficiently to capture more value for themselves. Typically in high competition environments it becomes harder and harder to make a profit.
These concepts should be obvious, I find it therefore distasteful and deplorable that one could somehow demean these platforms by saying that they "create a small number of superstars who earn orders of magnitude more than the average creator, with all other creators getting a relative pittance". They question the metrics the individuals who voted with their time and money used to decide "merit" because they didn't win by those metrics.
The distribution of ability is a bell curve (which has small tails, btw) but the distribution of rewards is basically power law. The result is that people only slightly different in ability can have wildly different rewards.
generally these types of activities don't actually follow a bell curve but a power law where a very tiny population reap the vast majority of the rewards and everyone else shares the scraps, trailing off and approaching zero. Think 10 YT videos get 10 billion views and the rest share a billion, with the mean being somewhere close to zero
taurath|6 years ago
We can break the cycle with self-hosted platform-agnostic tools. Most everything these platforms do is available off the shelf - the differentiations don't actually matter. The content creators aren't being given an audience, they build audiences for the platform. Everything the platform does once it has to start making money is in service to the platform and the investors, not the "workers", or the users.
doomlaser|6 years ago
Except, often critically, the very network effect that those platforms help foster.
Try self-hosting a viral video and see how far it gets you. It's much harder to break through. This very discussion is taking place on a platform that focuses a network effect for a very specific but sizeable audience. How would it take place otherwise?
claudeganon|6 years ago
Maybe the ongoing collapse of American cities as places that are unaffordable for anyone other that the ultra-wealthy will push software engineers in this direction. The housing crisis in San Francisco alone should demonstrate that class interests of white collar employees are more aligned with those of the workers on the platforms they create then those of their current owners.
dsaavy|6 years ago
As a random example, if someone is shopping for a steak, they normally would go to a market, grocery store, or butcher shop in a popular plaza near their home. If you’re in America, most likely that steak is sourced from a farm owned by a large corporation. You could go to local butcher who sources their meat from local small farms and add 30 minutes to your shopping, but it doesn’t have potatoes and green beans you'd like on the side of that steak dinner. Some people will absolutely make that trip, but not nearly as much as if that butcher got a shop in the popular plaza near everything else, owned by a commercial real estate company.
While the physical shopping example obviously has more friction than the digital example, the value is still high to provide a centrally located platform for consumers, creators and businesses to congregate. The power is rightfully focused on those that provide that platform.
mark_l_watson|6 years ago
I did see an interesting an interesting article about hosting your own content and then use shadow copies, linking back to original, on Medium, etc. I never tried it though, and I am not convinced it would be a good idea.
s_r_n|6 years ago
hardwaresofton|6 years ago
Another idea to go with this is giving the followers/subscribers a way to help the content creator that isn't (directly) monetary -- serving as a CDN for their content. I think the tools are actually even all there right now (torrenting, live stream relaying tech, DHTs, etc) -- it's just no one has created a compelling platform that is super easy to use -- I mean like no set up -- Enter your patreon/stripe, click "Stream" and start streaming, tell your followers to download the app.
There are some alternatives out there though:
- https://mediagoblin.org
- https://joinpeertube.org
An app like these, but with as little set up as possible and the right pairing for an easy path to profitability (again, probably just hooking up a stripe/patreon) and the right amount of social features would blow this wide open.
People often talk about the problem with moderation, but people on Twitch solve that mostly by empowering certain members of the audience to be moderators (who are happy to contribute and glad to get some power/special status).
Another problem that often is mentioned is discovery -- how will people find the good content? I think you can leave discovery to other platforms for now or find a way to solve it later -- worst case we can literally re-grow the way the old internet did it -- start with web rings, and scraping. In the extreme case, if discovery becomes such a bad problem, someone will step in and charge for it (whether on the supply or demand side).
As a side note, I almost wrote a rant on HN the other day about the "passion economy" (I believe it was on a article about restaurant), but thought better of it because I just don't think the HN crowd is ready to hear opinions against the current state of the capitalist system since most here are benefitting handily (the same insular view that prevents workers in tech from unionizing). I think it's growing in popularity because people are growing increasingly unsatisfied with their work prospects and are being fed fantasies about how they could succeed in a low-effort second job vaguely related to something they like doing. I think most people trying to become twitch streamers or make it big on youtube or as influencers would stop if their jobs paid them wages that made them feel financially secure. Sure some people would still stream/play/market or whatever, but they'd do it at their own pace and be much less focused on making a profit (and trading away rights/benefits to larger platform companies to do so). The real problem here isn't these companies, it's a unregulated capitalism creating a walking nightmare of "gig"s (whether it's an actual gig economy job or a full time job that pays you gig wages), giving people just enough so they can survive but not enough to thrive -- perfect for picking up another one of the gig economy jobs to try and get there.
mc32|6 years ago
Passion is great for hobbies. Passion should not be an ingredient or path to being a good employee or being a good citizen. Rigor yes, dedication, sure. Passion (I.e. suffering as it were), no, no that is that companies who want to milk you tell you, of managers who want to extract more from you and away from work life balance say. Sorry, but no.
mdorazio|6 years ago
angarg12|6 years ago
Now she has a 'boring office job', but at least she gets a predictable salary and career progression. Many times passion alone doesn't pay the bills.
dpflan|6 years ago
blue_devil|6 years ago
mikelyons|6 years ago
They may be creating something the world has never seen.
They may be devoted to waking up humanity.
The only person I know to be at this level of passion is Leo Gura.
matz1|6 years ago
Why ?
>Passion (I.e. suffering as it were),
If it something you passion about, its not suffering.
john_moscow|6 years ago
Come to think of it, the rise of multiple competing content platforms would actually lower the top performers' revenues due to the audience splintering.
Given that A16Z likely holds some stake in the mentioned businesses, I would treat this as simply another piece of marketing material for some upcoming IPOs.
JMTQp8lwXL|6 years ago
In developed countries, today's winners win bigger. The losers stagnate. Globally, many have been lifted out of poverty.
The poor in developing countries are doing better. The wealthy are doing better. The middle class is not.
doomlaser|6 years ago
xwdv|6 years ago
We need to think less about “the future of work” and think more about “the history of work”.
What people need to embrace is the Discipline Economy. It’s simple. Find something that is of value to society and pays enough, then work everyday to be better and better at it until you reach your maximum potential, and you will be rewarded. No passion required. You just get up and do it, every workday. And at the end of the day, clock out and go do whatever you want.
You don’t need to be doing something you like, you need to be doing something that sustains you. If that also happens to be something you like, then that is a gift, similar to being tall, or smart, or attractive. Life will be easier for you then, but that is not the default. Someone still has to shovel the piles of shit or dig a ditch.
The Passion Economy appeals to people who don’t ask what they can do for society, but rather what society can do for them. It’s selfish, and unsustainable. Passion doesn’t last forever. Discipline does.
mark_l_watson|6 years ago
I have a keen interest in future society/economy/technology and in a world with guaranteed minimum income, I hope people spend time on niche passion projects and not just binge on Netflix and HBO.
treerock|6 years ago
Unless society changes what it values, at which point you are fucked.
https://genius.com/Pete-seeger-john-henry-lyrics
blue_devil|6 years ago
I strongly believe that if you stay curious and pay attention to your work, any work can be(come) meaningful and rewarding.
Devise your own faster/better/lighter shovel or digger, or your own process for shovelling or digging etc.
The human mind is beautiful in that if you "feed" it the right way, it outputs the most amazing stuff.
ticmasta|6 years ago
How can you possibly hope to disrupt work with these types of values? </s>
undefined3840|6 years ago
Honestly I wish there was a stricter policy on HN for posting corporate content marketing puff pieces. These a16z blog posts do nothing more than hype companies in their portfolio.
munk-a|6 years ago
ticmasta|6 years ago
rdiddly|6 years ago
SolaceQuantum|6 years ago
It doesn't go into how feasible making a living income is actually, merely highlights the top earners in specific platforms... Rather suspicious to me.
smacktoward|6 years ago
It'd be interesting to see the payouts on these platforms evaluated on the basis of something like the Gini coefficient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient).
codingdave|6 years ago
gruglife|6 years ago
joe_the_user|6 years ago
Anyway, "passion" is usually/often code for "doing what you love instead of being paid", which may be fun but doesn't have a good retirement plan.
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
maximente|6 years ago
stakhanov|6 years ago
brosinante|6 years ago
It obviously occured to them, but they can't "monetize individuality" if you actually let people know there's no money in it for most.
gridlockd|6 years ago
By contrast, 99.99% of writers earn either nothing or very little from their "passion", because approximately nobody has the time and interest to read all of their stuff. It's a terrible career choice that people should be dissuaded from more actively.
I would imagine it's the same or similar for all other "passion gigs".
s17n|6 years ago
cryptica|6 years ago
Taking into account a competitive global environment with many traditional/productive jobs disappearing and being replaced by a much smaller number of extremely hard-to-get content creator jobs, I don't think it's going to end well. It's starting to look like that Black Mirror episode where people end up living in a box and generaring electricity with their legs.
matz1|6 years ago
TrackerFF|6 years ago
ozim|6 years ago
Companies often drag their feet and try to get away with not paying at all, counting that you will give up or they will find another sucker.
Top talented are rare, just enough talented are plenty. Good opportunities are rare, most of capital is in hands of top 1% so capital is also rare.
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
apache99|6 years ago
jeffml84|6 years ago
acephal|6 years ago
toptal|6 years ago
We believe our arguments are a bit more pointed and speak to the dynamics of the gig economy vs. [name your catchy other economy here].
dclusin|6 years ago
rdiddly|6 years ago
treelovinhippie|6 years ago
It's absurd for 0.01% of popular, early-adopter creators to be making $millions on these platforms while 99.99% with the same output quality and skills struggle to earn enough to cover a fraction of their living costs.
But of course equal wealth distribution and commons ownership is a blindspot that the Silicon Valley sociopaths will never pursue.
machawinka|6 years ago
Porthos9K|6 years ago
impatientduck|6 years ago
fake_satire|6 years ago
[deleted]
zarro|6 years ago
A very small portion become superstars and a majority fall somewhere in the middle, this is a natural phenomena.
What these platforms have allowed to happen is allowed individuals to capture more of the value they individually produce, with the result being these creators with abilities to perform BEYOND the average do much better.
Of course you don't see the natural selection cycle - the fact that many do not perform as well, and need to find some other - low competition - arena to express themselves in. In which they can perform more efficiently to capture more value for themselves. Typically in high competition environments it becomes harder and harder to make a profit.
These concepts should be obvious, I find it therefore distasteful and deplorable that one could somehow demean these platforms by saying that they "create a small number of superstars who earn orders of magnitude more than the average creator, with all other creators getting a relative pittance". They question the metrics the individuals who voted with their time and money used to decide "merit" because they didn't win by those metrics.
CuriouslyC|6 years ago
ticmasta|6 years ago