41–50 of 83 posts
Is it me or does this article seem “off”. The verbatim repetition of the thesis multiple times makes me think this wasn’t written by a person.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
THIS. Just how far into can’t-do-arithmetic self-delusion do you need to be, to believe that “you need X thousand followers to succeed financially” jobs could actually be available to more than a few people out of every X thousand???
From a theoretical point of view, that is not a problem. Given a population of Y people, each of which are following X other people, you can get X as high as Y-1. Fan bases are not mutually exclusive, just like I can shop both at place A and B and sell stuff at my own store C.
“ The creator economy, once hailed as the solution to economic inequality and the savior of the middle class, is facing challenges that threaten its very existence.” Not to nitpick, but did anyone really believe that becoming a tik tok influencer was a reasonable career path for more than a couple hundred people? I don’t see how most middle class people would’ve been helped by the creator economy
Even the 1%'s success is shaky. It's based on fashion, hysteria, playing engagement games and algorithms snowballing them into power. It cannot and will not ever work for a huge group, that's just not how attention is distributed. It's by definition winner-takes-all.
Is it me or does this article seem “off”. The verbatim repetition of the thesis multiple times makes me think this wasn’t written by a person.
https://therationalist.substack.com/p/glm-130b-an-open-bilin...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
THIS. Just how far into can’t-do-arithmetic self-delusion do you need to be, to believe that “you need X thousand followers to succeed financially” jobs could actually be available to more than a few people out of every X thousand???
From a theoretical point of view, that is not a problem. Given a population of Y people, each of which are following X other people, you can get X as high as Y-1. Fan bases are not mutually exclusive, just like I can shop both at place A and B and sell stuff at my own store C.
Look at wealth instead of income, and you will probably also find that "the middle class" has always been a bit of rose-coloured labelling of some slice out of a Pareto distribution. Traditionally, people have felt middle class because they were not comparing themselves to an entire distribution — but (almost by definition?) the "creator economy" has been focused* on a tail. * Eg I can easily find numbers for mean Ad…
Of course it depends how we define it. If the definition is some mid percentage by income then it would be fairly consistent over time because the absolute criteria would be constantly changing. However with those measures someone can maintain the same standard of living in society and leave or enter the middle class as demographics shift around them. If we use a more absolute measure that better tracks demographic change over time, such as having one third of income available for discretionary spending, or criteria such as home ownership or type of work done so we can better track changes over time, then more than half the worlds population is now middle class.
There used to be a very vibrant creator community, one in which most everyone earned a decent living. However, we no longer have a community of people growing food, making clothes, building and fixing houses, making metal tools, shoeing horses, etc. Cannot eat a blog post about food, cannot wear a photo of someone wearing expensive clothes, cannot live in a photo of a mansion.
Unlike some companies that look similar, I think Substack is not delivering a lot of value in terms of discovery. People come to Substack for Bari Weiss and not the other way around. It is not Medium, the low value domain of people who want to put low effort into blogging, where people are blown away because they got 70 views on a post. (Prediction: Medium’s user base will defect once somebody comes up with a platform that uses LLMs to write their blog posts for them)
Substack would like to grow to be more than e-mail newsletters but the creators and users will have a say in that.
I half agree with this article. There does seem to be a typical power law in terms of who is able to make a bunch of $ and make this a viable career. That being said, 'winning' doesn't necessarily mean having this be your entire job or revenue source. I think we're progressively going to see more 'portfolio careers' or people holding multiple small jobs. I've seen many folks have small ish followings (say few thousan…
Then, I would argue, you are not a creator, you are just running your own ads for your actually business on YouTube. This is not to say that it is a bad choice, you might really enjoy it, it might be more cost efficient than other ways of advertising or whatever.
“ The creator economy, once hailed as the solution to economic inequality and the savior of the middle class, is facing challenges that threaten its very existence.” Not to nitpick, but did anyone really believe that becoming a tik tok influencer was a reasonable career path for more than a couple hundred people? I don’t see how most middle class people would’ve been helped by the creator economy
I think a massive number of 15-25 year olds think it's not only a reasonable career path, but their preferred career path. They don't expect to become middle class though, they expect to become rich and famous.
Art and entertainment has had more supply than demand for at least a century because it is a great life for self-directed creators.