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The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

a16z.com

1–10 of 92 posts

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#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.

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#3

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.

Seeing how a16z just gave Substack a ton of money, got to do some self promotion.

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#4

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 is thinly veiled marketing for a handful of sites they wanted to call out.

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#5

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 platforms evaluated on the basis of something like the Gini coefficient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient).

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#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.

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#7
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 costs.

But of course equal wealth distribution and commons ownership is a blindspot that the Silicon Valley sociopaths will never pursue.

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#9

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 a classic submarine piece. we know these distributions have tails that are long as hell and the platforms themselves subject to massive first mover advantages.

Re: The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

#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 much better.

Of course you don't see the natural selection cycle - the fact that many do not perform as well, and need to find some other - low competition - arena to express themselves in. In which they can perform more efficiently to capture more value for themselves. Typically in high competition environments it becomes harder and harder to make a profit.

These concepts should be obvious, I find it therefore distasteful and deplorable that one could somehow demean these platforms by saying that they "create a small number of superstars who earn orders of magnitude more than the average creator, with all other creators getting a relative pittance". They question the metrics the individuals who voted with their time and money used to decide "merit" because they didn't win by those metrics.

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