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The creator economy: the top 1% and everyone else

therationalist.substack.com

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Re: The creator economy: the top 1% and everyone else

#31

Post by mbustamanter »

j7ake wrote: post #3

Are there any entrepreneurial professions that do not have this winner take all dynamic ? The only ones I can think of are professions with some physical constraints. Eg where the product requires the professional to be physically present. Eg surgeons, luthiers, sports therapists.

Anything that isn't scalable. Taleb writes at length about this difference in The Black Swan, categorizing professions in which there are winner-take-all effects (Extremistan) and low variance, stable, one-sample-is-representative ones (Mediocristan). As you said, surgeon (the example Taleb gives is 'dentist'), prostitute, taylor, and so on. He also notes that some professions can switch categories, e.g. musician, since the existence of recording technology the distribution became a Pareto one.

Re: The creator economy: the top 1% and everyone else

#32

Post by wslh »

Are we just paraphrasing a critique of the "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More" book [1]? Internet offered new eyes for new content but few winners remain. For sure Internet offers new opportunities to people. For example, well paid remote dev jobs outside of the center of power (SV) but they are not creators, they are workers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail_(book)

Re: The creator economy: the top 1% and everyone else

#33

Post by PaulKeeble »

ffwacom wrote: post #27
gruez wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yeah, is the top only fans girl really 10x or whatever more valuable than the penultimate only fans girl? That's the wrong interpretation. The reason why the top only fan girl gets 10x more revenue than the penultimate only fans girl is because she's marginally better, so more people flock to her. This works because her marginal cost of production is zero, so her having 10x the fans doesn't cost her 10x the work. Th…

Fair enough, it must be inevitable and the algorithm is irrelevant.

The algorithms tend to favour entrenchment. They don't select on good or best they don't understand those qualities so they select on the basis of popular, assuming people are aware of the best. The issue with that is once a best has been selected years later the algorithm has effectively boosted them even with better options. Discovery is a real problem on most social media but especially on places like twitch.

Re: The creator economy: the top 1% and everyone else

#34

Post by lgas »

nkko wrote: post #10
tylerscott wrote: post #6

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.

Haven't bothered to read it. GPT detector says it is 99% fake. https://openai-openai-detector.hf.space/

Ignoring for the moment the accuracy of that tool, even if the prose is 99% AI written, that doesn't meant that the result is fake. Maybe their model wrote it.

Edit: You can try it here https://huggingface.co/spaces/THUDM/GLM-130B. I tried it. I was not impressed.

Re: The creator economy: the top 1% and everyone else

#35

Post by theK »

auggierose wrote: post #25
bell-cot wrote: post #13

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.

Yeah but the size of those fan bases does have some practical upper bounds. Usually accounts follow a set of x people where x is in the hundreds whereas creators need to get to Y followers where Y is typically measured in a size orders of magnitude bigger than x. So you have a, practical, hard asymetry

Re: The creator economy: the top 1% and everyone else

#36

Post by civilized »

vehemenz wrote: post #22
tylerscott wrote: post #6

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.

The style is reminiscent of an eighth grade essay. The thesis is as trite and obvious as they come. For bonus points, the writer cites sources without linking to them, including Forbes—the worst pay-to-play publication out there.

Citing without linking is something I've seen ChatGPT do. It knows this sort of article should contain this sort of citation but doesn't know or care what to actually link.

The second half of the article seems more authentic though. I'm not sure ChatGPT would come up with "the middle class comes from economic friction" (paraphrasing).

Re: The creator economy: the top 1% and everyone else

#37

Post by toomuchtodo »

oj2828 wrote: post #4

“ 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

> but did anyone really believe that becoming a tik tok influencer was a reasonable career path for more than a couple hundred people?

Yes, there are huge swaths of the population that are, to put it politely, low information and unsophisticated. Everyone comes around to the disappointment of the situation at their own pace.

Re: The creator economy: the top 1% and everyone else

#38

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

bell-cot wrote: post #13
oj2828 wrote: post #4

“ 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

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???

Yeah but not everyone's trying to be an influencer, most people are still doctors, engineers, etc

Re: The creator economy: the top 1% and everyone else

#39

Post by fullshark »

oj2828 wrote: post #4

“ 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.

Re: The creator economy: the top 1% and everyone else

#40

Post by whodidntante »

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.

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