Lol
I heard someone talking about a content creator they watch, and how that creator basically can’t take a vacation without losing tons of followers and potentially a major chunk of their income.
Yep, this exactly. They can never clock out at the end of the day. It isn’t 8 hours of work and you’re done. You’re having to constantly try to innovate. Make tons of content, spend so much time editing, constant filming, constant planning. And if you deviate in your schedule, or upload some content that isn’t interesting, the algorithm punishes you and you may even get people that unsubscribe.
Must be hell when you can’t afford to take a vacation from that content creator life. Can never really “switch off”. Plus the fact that less than 1% actually make it big, and it’s mostly based on luck plus years and years of determination.
It isn’t 8 hours of work and you’re done
That really depends on the type of content. Something like LTT is very much 8 hours and you’re done, except the handful of times when there’s a time crunch (e.g. new hardware launch). Even smaller creators plan out videos in advance and can create a working schedule.
The hardest part is starting out, followed by finding an audience. Once you get the audience, creating a consistent schedule is the easier part, especially once you can start hiring help.
I hear this all the time but I struggle to see how it is true. How many people regularly trawl through their feed looking for creators who haven’t posted in X days and unfollowing them? It would be a minuscule number. I’m pretty darn selective with my follows and I think I’d do this once a year, tops.
I think creators are conflating the everyday ups and downs of follower counts on their platform(s) as being something more. And I think the platforms themselves are encouraging this mentality because they need fresh content.
Just because you do something a certain way doesn’t mean everyone does. A huge chunk of these peoples income comes from the random people who find their videos or streams because of the “algorithm”. Not from their regular viewers. Those regular viewers allow for a certain amount of steadiness, but they’re also more likely to watch videos at a later time rather than right when they’re uploaded. Which is a significant drop in revenue for each view.
As OP specified in another reply, they were talking about streamers specifically. And with them, big chunk of the income comes from Twitch subscribers, which is a monthly paid subscription. If you are willing to pay someone for it, you’ll notice pretty much immediately if they miss their scheduled stream and cancel it.
For many other platforms what you said is true, I’m way more likely to unsubscribe from someone when they post a video and remind me I’m still subbed than when they take a break and fade out of my feed.
This seems like a flaw in the design of the platform…
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OK, Santa.
A lot of creators will have a number of videos created ahead of time, so they can go on holiday and still have a steady release schedule.
Doesn’t help if you’re a streamer, though. I guess that was a part I left out, whoops -_-
Larger streamers post reruns.
Yeah, that’s a whole different world.
Don’t they just take working vacations?
You can’t turn off any job. We all are burning out in this bitch. At least you’re sitting at home making videos.
Okay, not sure how much this matters considering where the world is heading, but:
If they can’t get better working conditions because you’ll complain (it’s not fair, yadda yadda), how will you get better working conditions when they complain (it’s not fair, yadda yadda)?
I’m just saying, if you’re not willing to play ball, why should I care about your sick pay?
Medicaid is gonna burn up soon. Should I be concerned that you’ll be losing coverage, or are we just fully on board with this petty individualism?
Won’t someone think of the poor influencers!? Sorry, “creators”. Just like Van Gogh and Stanley Kubrick.
If someone calls themselves an “influencer“ I immediately want to punch them in the face.
first of all these people are basicly making others buy crap they dont really want. second: this is just an article about young workers, who work too much and cant seperate their private life from worklife. could have been an insightful newspiece if it werent for guardian and the usual forced buzzwords.
Boo hoo, losers. Your device has a power switch. Influencers have a warped and inflated sense of the value they create. They can stop at any time and use their skills in other ways.
Making good content is hard, but ‘good’ content doesn’t have an expiration date. Shallow brain-rot content does and that’s what the algorithms reward.
The entitlement that influencers have is nauseating. There are many creators out there laboring in near obscurity and producing useful content all the time for little or no compensation.
They are tools for Zuck and fools for propping his platforms up. It sounds like a hard slog, but they can stop any time.
You’re making enemies of your own team. These people are creatives, doing a job they love, and a corporate algorithm forces them to destroy their work life balance to keep doing what they love. And you’re belittling them. You need a reality check, these people are not your enemy.
Nah, if you are feeding the Zuck, not my team. The principled creatives aren’t there.
It sucks to try to make a living as a creative. But giving your efforts to support social media platforms controlled by the worst people is inexcusable. Zuck literally and provably helped the fascists gain power.
The creatives I can respect create because they are compelled to. They work jobs and create when they can. They share their work on less shitty platforms and in actual real life.
Curious who signs your paychecks?
Facebook isn’t the only site these people use…
Zuck owns more than Facebook, too. ANY big social media platform is similarly toxic.
These people have co-opted our social discourse for evil causes. And they aren’t the only way to share work online.
Creative people do not have a right to my admiration if they provide fresh bait that the oligarchs use to degrade democracy and civil society
The question isn’t about admiration, it’s about considering them worthy of being respected as fellow human beings who are also struggling. You’re just shitting on them because the way they make their living is more directly linkable to sources you don’t like.
Every job is going to be that way, one way or another. Even many charities will have shady ties somewhere, that most of the volunteers and employees don’t know shit about. Shitting on these people because you don’t respect the things they’re linked to, and ultimately have no control over, is petty and meaningless. It devalues them as humans, and as much as I’m sure you don’t think so, they’re still human. And deserve to be treated as such.
If they’re like the Pauls or something, I can see criticizing them for being shitty people… but that’s not what you’re doing, you’re shitting on them for being part of a system that exists whether they make use of it or not. And will continue to exist whether they use it or not.
Do creative people have viable paths to income that aren’t social media?
How does one survive as an artist or a small film maker, when there is no patronage, government funding for museums is constantly on the chopping block, and any form of art you make is going to be uploaded whether you like it or not?
Our society essentially has no paths to success for creative types other than social media - especially with C-suites deciding that they’d rather use the plagiarism machine to make slop than hire actual content makers and artists?
Making things like clip art used to be a job. You used to be able to paint signs. There was work for mid level artists. Now, your options are trying to go viral on social media/hunt for commissions.
Yeah sheez. You know what you can’t pause? The flow of customers into the drive through. Internet influencers work on their own clock.
Let’s get an article about fast food worker burnout please.
but ‘good’ content doesn’t have an expiration date.
Yes, it does, depending on the topic. If it’s video games, like with MOBAs that get updated regularly, all the content for that patch expires after two weeks. Itemization and champion builds change so much that whatever value there was for you to build similarly is lost, and you’re left with a mildly amusing thing about how something used to be.
The responses in this thread are sick. So much vitriol for members of your own class who are just trying to make a living doing what they love and creating things.
in the early days of the internet, I’m talking GeoCities days, I started what would be called a podcast about gaming. I recorded with windows sound recorder and a shitty Logitech desktop mic and then ran it through RealAudio to compress it to a downloadable format.
I shared it with communities online like IRC and BBS’s.
I got shit on so fucking much that I quit after my 6th cast. I received so much hate that I honestly thought of self harm.
now, it wasn’t right that it happened. but, it happened decades ago before podcasting, live streaming, YouTube, content creators, and influencers were a “thing”. my point is, it is a danger of creating anything for the world. if you don’t have the skin for it, the world will eat you alive, so get over it.
I dont give a fuck about their burnout lol. if they love it so much why are they whining about doing it?
I’m in health care, you think illness has a pause button? I chose this, they chose theirs.
Cool, I have workplace stress and complete fatigue from sitting in an office dealing with bullshit all day and I don’t get paid millions fucking around on YouTube and tiktok. You can’t pause any job. Stfu
Firstly, let’s call them what they are, hucksters.
Secondly, I cannot think of anything I give a shit less about than their burnout at making internet videos of themselves.
If you’ve talked yourself into a world where you must be on social media, you are absolutely fucked. Get out. now.
More like discontent creators amiright?
I’ve taken to calling them effluencers.
effluencers
It perfectly describes their contribution to this reality. Thank you.
I’m hoping it catches on. Spread it around.
only use things with pause buttons!
I’m so glad I was young before this stupid reality happened. I have a regular job and no desire for internet fame.
I asked my younger family members what they want to be when they grow up, and being a YouTuber was at the top of the list. I hate this so much.
So no follow-up questions? “What content are you gonna make? How are you gonna promote it? Any backup plans?”
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This is the most boomer take I’ve ever seen on this website. And that includes what few conservatives have filtered in.
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Just keeping up with the boomer takes…
Something doesn’t need to be a physical product to hold tangible value.
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Also, you didn’t choose to share your profession with us. It makes me think that you’re attempting to create a social media presence of your own.
Either that or I don’t think value is only subjective to what you do for a living. That my opinion is somehow less valuable because I don’t fall into a specific field you perceive as valuable.
I’m just saying that without those who work in physical reality, creating tangibles with tangible things, make the mental edifices possible.
And often those non-tangible things help to give those who make the tangible things the willpower to go on. It’s not a one way street, where value is only created by those who create tangible goods and stolen by the intangible. That’s a very pessimistic, if not “holier-than-thou” perspective. As though anyone who doesn’t do what you respect isn’t worth as much as someone who does.
Like I said, a very boomer attitude.
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Who did you?
By that metric do authors or poets or actors create a physical product? Do computer programers? Since the death of physical media, books and art are now far more frequently digital than paper or canvas. Applications and software is 100% digital. Newspapers are dead, so journalists don’t create a physical product. Is your argument that only physical labor producing physical things is “real” work?
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Why won’t you feel sympathy for someone who’s hurting? Why do you feel that someone needs to fall into a very narrow category to be “worth your time”?
Just because someone doesn’t fall into your narrow view of what’s worthwhile doesn’t mean they’re not worth basic human compassion.
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I just don’t understand their desire to be the center of attention
There is that aspect of it, but there’s also the aspect of writing your own destiny, about creating something you care about instead of just being a nameless cog in an industrial machine putting out consumerist crap day in and day out. Why is the latter more admirable to you than the former?
It doesn’t come across as you appreciating value in artistic expression and other intangibles when you say “suck it up and get a real job”. That may not have been your intention, but it can definitely be read that way. I think that is the “boomer” people have commented on.
I don’t think there are really that many people who think social media creators or better than farmers or essential services personnel, and those that do are completely out of touch, but there are plenty of people who see alternative media creators as less than any other job. I personally think A-list actors, celebrities and sports professionals are no better than grocery store worker or warehouse person, but I won’t deny they work just as hard in different ways.
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yeah I’m pretty shocked that a socialist website would value labor over entertainment like that
Socialism is about more than unions, that’s just the most obvious aspect in a heavily capitalist society. It’s about the sharing of burdens, which includes more than physical labor.
That entertainment is labor. What are you talking about?
You are better.
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You can’t pause the internet
Something I had to tell my mom all the time.
“Pause your damn game!”
“Its online, I can’t pause it!”
Funny. I follow some creators, but if they don’t post I’ll just check back later, and the content will still be relevant.
If your followers just leave you if you don’t post, your content is probably shallow and doesn’t really add much value to the world.
The algorithm is also fucked, but you use it to your advantage when you can, so can you really complain about the downside? This is what you choose to work with.
That being said, making good content is hard and really time consuming. So I get that there is stress.
But I believe if you make good solid content that suits you and your style, you don’t need to get into a pissing contest with the algorithm. Upload when you want, make what you want and you will attract viewers. They are out there, and they will find you through searching.
Yeah most of the content I watch is still useful years later. Now it may not be super current since tech changes so fast, but still useful. If you have to stay in someone’s face all the time to stay memorable, you’re not memorable or relevant.
If your audience will disappear because you go away for 5 minutes you were probably not providing anything of value in the first place
