61–70 of 92 posts
My hunch is that for the "gig economy" to become anything more than worker exploitation, they will need to be restructured as commons-owned P2P networks where earnings and value are ~equally distributed. It's absurd for 0.01% of popular, early-adopter creators to be making $millions on these platforms while 99.99% with the same output quality and skills struggle to earn enough to cover a fraction of their living cost…
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.
They may be creating something the world has never seen.
They may be devoted to waking up humanity.
The only person I know to be at this level of passion is Leo Gura.
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…
Then at least you should keep searching for it until you find it or die. There are virtually unlimited thing you can do in life, its unlikely there is nothing one is passionate about.
It's getting increasingly difficult to achieve these passions -- requiring people to feign "passion" just so they can work jobs that often negate these real passions (namely, free time, but often more) just burns people out and sucks their souls dry.
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.
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.
It's telling that they call out how much money the top earners on Substack and Podia are making, rather than how much the average or median creators on those platforms make. These types of platforms generally end up creating a small number of superstars who earn orders of magnitude more than the average creator, with all other creators getting a relative pittance. It'd be interesting to see the payouts on these platf…
Actually, it's better for these platforms to have the average be low bc it means they have exposure to as many creators as possible. The cost of supporting each marginal creator is basically zero so they want to maximize their odds of onboarding a creator that will be successful even if that means onboarding hundreds of unsuccessful creators to get them.
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…
As someone who has worked in the arts for over a decade, I see no path forward besides worker ownership of these platforms. Every other arrangement leads to race-to-the-bottom for the labor on these platforms. Maybe the ongoing collapse of American cities as places that are unaffordable for anyone other that the ultra-wealthy will push software engineers in this direction. The housing crisis in San Francisco alone sh…
A large percentage of Americans live in cities. Are they all ultra-wealthy?