[johnpowell]

Back in the day the internet for normal people was 3 bucks a hour over a 14,400 modem. I didn't consider myself a "creator" for posting my recipes for making mashed potatoes in a crock pot. I just wanted to make the world have better mashed potatoes. I did it for free. There was no "like" button or comments or monetization. Just this nerd and a crock pot and a gross amount of butter. That is not a joke. I had a crock pot cooking site. I didn't have a counter or anything. Maybe it was popular.. I will never know.

The internet was pretty great when it was just people sharing info without looking for a advertising partnership with Land 'O Lakes.

[onion2k]

The internet was pretty great when it was just people sharing info without looking for a advertising partnership with Land 'O Lakes.

It's all very well lamenting the Good Old Days of the web when the content was free and the adverts were few as if it's disappeared but it really hasn't. There are thousands of people making content and publishing it to Instagram, YouTube, and various recipe websites and blogs every day. They do it for the love of publishing their thoughts. People still do that.

Two other things are different now though.

Firstly, our expectations changed. Unless someone is an "influencer" or a "thought leader" many people deem them not to be worth their time. We have a measure of quality and anything that falls below it gets ignored (or even ridiculed.)

Secondly, we stopped searching for content. Today people don't search the web for content. They go to a website where an algorithm curates "the best mashed potato recipes ever" in to a playlist or a listicle for them. It's not surprise at all that's the content produced by professional content marketing companies, and it's the stuff that has adverts on it.

[bluntfang]

>There are thousands of people making content and publishing it to Instagram, YouTube, and various recipe websites and blogs every day.

I really don't think that it's possible given the engineering of those platforms. They are literally spending millions, if not billions, of dollars on addiction technology. To think that an individual can overcome that is naive and hubristic.

[ceilingcorner]

Perhaps there wouldn't be so many "content creators" if tech/the Internet hadn't destroyed their livelihoods over the past 20+ years. Authors, journalists, photographers, the list goes on and on.

"I wish people just made content for free" comments always seem to come from people with comfortable, secure incomes and careers.

[vermilingua]

That may perhaps be because some of the best content also comes from people with comfortable, secure incomes and careers.

When people create content they are passionate about for a living, they a) often quickly lose that passion, and b) are more willing to compromise on the quality of their content in order to turn more profit (often through no fault of their own, but as a result of the exploitative nature of most content platforms).

[scalablenotions]

That's cool, but I want people to be able to independently create content for me to enjoy, which is a bit less of a crock. That will probably takes all their time and they need to pay for ingredients for their pot. Bring on universal basic income I guess.

[jmkerr]

In my experience professionalising content creation (on youtube) hardly helps quality.

Usually they end up filming their cooking lessons hanging the latest Canon from a drone in their Dubai studio kitchen with nothing substantial left to say. Maybe people will stick around because they are still able to afford to outspend other creators on exotic ingredients and they're just looking for a familiar face to entertain them. I'm not familiar with cooking channels, but you'll see a lot of 'professional' music teachers on youtube eventually making an 'A=432 Hz' video. It's downright tragic how the urge to publish takes a hold of them.

They also usually will become clowns. Since people will stick around for the entertainment rather than educational value, I've seen a lot of professional content creators trying way too hard to be casual and approachable, incorporating idiosyncrasies and bloopers on purpose, then making fun of them. Eventually their video thumbnails will be them actually making funny faces.

It doesn't always have to be like that, and I'm not judging you for enjoying their content, just be aware that in the age of youtube you're soon dealing with basically corporations who couldn't care what they're selling, as long as they can keep selling it.

[irrational]

But there is already more excellent content that has already been created than you could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes. Do we really need to support people to create more? I feel like we can enjoy what we already have and don't need to continuously look for something new. If people really really really want to create something, they will find a way to do so.

[CaptArmchair]

But... they can do exactly that. You can whip up a few pages in HTML with pictures and put on Github or shared hosting. Heck, you can even use a publishing platform like WordPress if you're not technically inclined. Each time you use your pot for a family dinner, you jot down the recipe and you publish it. Boom: you've created content!

So, what's the problem then?

It's how the goalpost for defining success have shifted. You're only successful if you are a full time writer of crock pot recipes, and you can leverage your content as a jumping board for wider fame. Which means you spend your days in the kitchen, churning out recipes, you market your content, you strike a branding deal with a crock pot manufacturer, etc. etc. etc.

This is an impossible and unrealistic standard. It's also the standard by which influencers, streamers, Instagram models and so on hold themselves and each other.

The other implied assumption here is that a source on crock pot cooking is only reliable if supported by a professional expert who does just that full time. But if you use this bar to assess quality of content, you risk missing really valuable and great crock pot information out there. Moreover, that expert? Maybe they are paid to push a brand of expensive crock pots; whereas the next hobby cook does the exact same thing in a pot that costs a quarter of the price.

"Oh! But creative creators ought to be paid for their hard work!"

Tough luck. This was a challenge long before the Web was conceived. Few artists, painters, writers, playwrights, sculptors,... were financially independent. Either they were wealthy themselves (nobility,...), or they were lucky to work for wealthy patrons (historically, patronage was a way to display power). Plenty of creators scraped - and are scraping - by with odd jobs. Plenty of now famous writers had other means of income at the start of their careers.

Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, was manager of a Saab dealership, a public relations officer for GE and volunteer fire fighter. Harper Lee was a reservation clerk at Eastern Airlines while she wrote in her spare time, until her friends gave her, aged 30, a note on Christmas 1956: "You have a year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas." They all had pitched in and gifted her a year's wages. That's what allowed her to write To Kill A Mockingbird.

So, when you look at the body of famous artists, and how things worked out for them, you want to be aware of survivor bias.

Sure, UBI would support many more creative endeavours such as they are. But it's no silver bullet. If anything, there's this prevailing idea that it's somehow easy, and preferable, to make a full time, financially independent living by publishing digital content (text, video,...) on the Web. This is a gross overestimation of what the Web can do for you. It just creates unrealistic expectations and sets people, especially young people, up for disappointment if it doesn't work out.

By no means does that mean one shouldn't be creating content and publishing on the Web. But please do it for the right reasons: because it's something you deeply enjoy doing above all anything else.

[galoisgirl]

That's nice, but this thread isn't about you then.

I'm following creators whose content takes days of research and making. They're not greedy for wanting to monetize this work, they just need to earn a living sometime.

[dan00]

> Just this nerd and a crock pot and a gross amount of butter.

Sure, it’s always the butter, there can’t be too much.

[lukas099]

Want to share your mashed potato recipe?