Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

pluralistic.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 133 posts

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#71

Post by anigbrowl »

pfdietz wrote: post #18
Dalewyn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why should non-creatives go along with this? We shouldn't. Art has historically been vastly overvalued and I like that its perceived/demanded value has been sharply declining over the past several decades and especially now with the advent of "AI". I'm sorry if anyone reading this is an artist and I just twisted your pantaloons, but artists don't serve any valuable role in society. Artists exist strictly because soc…

Indeed. To a large extent, art was a means of displaying your social status, a way of demonstrating your wealth and buffing your ego. It was used as a justification for colonialism and imperialism. Our society is so advanced; look at the art it produces; obviously we're superior so we should dictate what others do.

Right, right, nobody but the social elites ever wanted to decorate anything, be entertained, or engage in cultural practices for mere enjoyment. Folk music? Dancing? mere impositions of social organization. These people think they're having fun, but that's because they lack true consciousness.

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#72

Post by raytopia »

foxhop wrote: post #63

I built an app that lets creatives sell their digital and physical goods https://www.makepostsell.com/ It's open source and public domain, uses stripe for holding card information

Interesting platform because it's open source does thay mean one could easily move off the platform for any reason.

I also see that you don't handle sales tax which is a bummer and is one of the reasons people use a lot of centralized platforms but I get why you don't because it's a nightmare.

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#73

Post by roughly »

raytopia wrote: post #67

Has anyone ever figured out if there's a way to design the internet so gatekeepers and centralized platforms don't come to dominate everything? Or are we just doomed to see this happen time and time again.

Doctorow’s written a few books here - not sure if they provide an answer, but he’s been one of the better thinkers in this space:

https://craphound.com/shop/

Similarly, I liked Jaron Lanier’s “Who Owns the Future?”, which deals with similar topics:

https://www.jaronlanier.com/futurewebresources.html

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#75

Post by navane »

raytopia wrote: post #67

Has anyone ever figured out if there's a way to design the internet so gatekeepers and centralized platforms don't come to dominate everything? Or are we just doomed to see this happen time and time again.

Antitrust regulation? Government regulated infrastructure with many free market players on top?

For example: a plaza that is maintained and scheduled by the municipality, with many private business vendors of overlapping goods.

Afaik this is econ 101.

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#76

Post by pfdietz »

mdorazio wrote: post #34
tom-_- wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the author is saying the share of revenue the distributors (tech, music industry) are receiving is misaligned with the value they're adding. Compare content creators with a SWE. They both produce the product being sold, what percentage of the revenue should they receive?

This “people should be paid based on the value they create” myth comes up a lot on HN. Compensation is only tied to value creation as a maximum level. The actual compensation level is whatever people are willing to work for while doing good-enough work. If you want to price your work based on value, you need to run your own business.

Markets are how economic value gets defined. Trying to define it otherwise is fraught with often disastrous difficulty. This is one of the reasons central planning fails.

I think one of the reasons so many creatives feel cheated is there's far too much creativity, so the marginal value of more is low. In that situation of overabundance, some other step in the value chain will deliver most of the value, and reap the reward. This feels like exploitation, but it's just the market telling creatives they need to be producing something else.

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#77

Post by Ekaros »

anukin wrote: post #62
tom-_- wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the author is saying the share of revenue the distributors (tech, music industry) are receiving is misaligned with the value they're adding. Compare content creators with a SWE. They both produce the product being sold, what percentage of the revenue should they receive?

Majority of the so called creatives or influencers in the tech platforms produce sub standard material. There are cases of people like sssniperwolff etc whose entire content is rehashing on other peoples work and making money of it. And then there are people who produce life vlogs and shopping hauls. Are they worth more than a software engineer or a farmer who produces actual tangible assets for consumption?

And when you really get into it. What about factory workers producing high margin products? Don't they deserve larger cut as without them there would be no money coming in... Surely that is much more valuable than what is now paid?

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#78

Post by foxhop »

raytopia wrote: post #72
foxhop wrote: post #63

I built an app that lets creatives sell their digital and physical goods https://www.makepostsell.com/ It's open source and public domain, uses stripe for holding card information

Interesting platform because it's open source does thay mean one could easily move off the platform for any reason. I also see that you don't handle sales tax which is a bummer and is one of the reasons people use a lot of centralized platforms but I get why you don't because it's a nightmare.

Thanks, the process to move off the platform is a process that needs to be built and documented, the data lives in a shared digital ocean bucket, the database uses uuids and we could try dumping only the relevant data out of the shared database. it was built as a multi tenet platform.

Future work is supporting api/secret keys to bring your own s3 bucket/digital ocean spaces, while keeping the database shared. otherwise it costs roughly $11/mo to host a copy of the platform ($6 for a virtual server and $5 for the digital ocean space)

As for taxes, this will be something that will need to be tackled at some point but so far I've been kicking the can down the road hoping I could find a partner to help figure that out in a clever way that is proper.

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#79

Post by pdonis »

pfdietz wrote: post #4

What this is saying is that creativity is privileged and (unlike other forms of labor) should be given more than the market says it's worth. Why should non-creatives go along with this?

> more than the market says it's worth

It isn't. The market says it's worth a lot. But the vast majority of that "a lot" doesn't go to the actual creators. It goes to middlemen.

Unfortunately, the only fix for that, from the creators' point of view, is for them to own the middlemen themselves. But creators generally have neither the time nor the desire to do that, and doing it detracts from their ability to create.

Re: Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off

#80

Post by CPLX »

golergka wrote: post #19

It just comes down to the fact that music is cheap. Outside of a very small cohort of star artists, musicians just don't create anything that people at large value to any significant extent. Only a very small portion of your fans would be willing to pay for a CD or a T-shirt; most just have a song or two in a playlist somewhere, and if you make your music unavailable on that steaming platform, they won't even notice.

How about this. Take away all the musicians and their music and see what Spotify and all its software developers are worth by themselves.

Now do the opposite.

Figured it out yet?

Music is one of the most universal and important things in our culture. People define themselves and their identity with it, and most certainly value it and will pay for it.

How we structure our economic systems determines if it’s “cheap” or not and who gets the profits from it. It’s certainly not an intrinsic quality.

Post reply on HN