What the new tech creator-content platforms and economy miss
Adam Neely on "quitting #youtube " puts two ideas together (that I hadn’t) and implicitly asks “what if the new platform/economy fails you”
Longevity and freedom from traditional gatekeepers. The content-creator economy fails on these promises.
Burn out is baked in and ignoring the traditional gate-keepers is at your own very serious risk.
The world is the same, tech is just milking us.
It’s probably (very) naive of me, but I hadn’t quite thought that the whole thing is a grift against everyone.
Ads, data tracking, *and* tricking you into ignoring the economy/industry that actually matters in the name of “evolution” and “breaking things”.
Can’t help but see some (stretched) resonance with the #fediverse. Is this just some tech idea that needs to convince all of us that it’s the good new thing? What if at its core there’s something wrong and it fails us?
It’s normal to feel suspicious of new social media when we’re so used to propriety software by publicly traded companies of the likes of Facebook.
Ha. That’s not what’s going on here.
The suspicion here is more along the lines of whether tech people can be trusted to make good things especially when some special tech idea is at the core. What are the chances that tech people just really like the idea of decentralised federated social media and haven’t really thought through whether it works well at scale?
If they had, there’d be documented analysis of this rather than just advocacy.
@maegul @workreform I’ve been writing about exactly this for a while but it’s such a complex web of internet history, individual psychology, marketing concepts, and business models that it’s been taking me months to figure out a cohesive argument.
Basically there’s kind of a grift. But not in the way most think.
The creator economy led to a lot of people starting “businesses” without knowing a single thing about business. They just know audience and content. It doesn’t work.
@maegul @workreform these online platforms have made it extremely easy to accidentally attract a large enough following that it can get monetized. But when you remove that much friction - you get people with large audiences who have no idea what to do with them. They don’t actually understand why their following is valuable and so they cannot control the value.
And a lot of them don’t want to learn the difficult business aspects of their own work… so they keep outsourcing it to algorithms
@maegul @workreform but because they don’t actually understand what the algorithms or their brand deals represent or what any of those other brands are truly paying for… creators are trapped.
Often they are trapped in the confines of a single platform which they happen to understand to some degree and where they do have an audience. So they stay trapped within that one platform, that one ecosystem, and that one algorithm.
They can’t replicate their success cause they don’t really get it.
@maegul @workreform I’ve been referring to this as “the single platform creator trap” - a creator who is trapped by their own belief that they can’t control the value they bring, is stuck within one third-party online platform, and who doesn’t fundamentally know how to recreate their success or take it elsewhere.
Creators who can make multiple platforms work always always always have way more control.
It’s a self-imposed alienation from owning the means of production in Marxist terms.
Part of the issue is that yeah sure, the music industry is full of fat cats, arrogance, connections and dumb luck, but there is a pathway for small artists to get noticed and slowly build up a career, gain an audience, connect with fans at local shows, and just having fun with your band without huge expectations.
Like Adam says with Youtube those fat cats are instead the algorithms. The issue is that the algorithms are like a treadmill that systematically keeps speeding up, lowering payouts, reducing exposure and raising roadblocks unless you follow an ever-increasing amount of rules. People starting out there are at even more of disadvantage to begin with.
All so that Google and other tech platforms can extract more money out of people. We need a Fediverse music sharing service or something.
Worth watching or thinking about this recent related video (post of mine):
masto: https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/111814353381348375
