The Passion Economy and the Future of Work • Hacker News Board

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#11

Post by dpflan » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #6

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.

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”.

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#12

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #2

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.

[deleted]

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#13

Post by undefined3840 » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

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.

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#14

Post by xwdv » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 9:22 PM UTC

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.

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#15

Post by s17n » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 9:25 PM UTC

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.

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#16

Post by taurath » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

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.

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#17

Post by joe_the_user » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#18

Post by CuriouslyC » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

zarro wrote: post #10

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…

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.

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#19

Post by doomlaser » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

taurath wrote: post #16

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 cont…

> 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?

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#20

Post by cryptica » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

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.