I get this feeling when youtubers complain about being demonetized.
Like, why were you monetized in the first place?
Shouldn't this be a hobby for you, where your day job is actually helping people?
Once a profession is named, there seems to be an expectation of durability.
But market fundamentalism allows for no such constants.
All professions are subject to the market; if there is no demand, if there is no money, there is no profession.
In any event, it's a problem that definitely sorts itself out.
I don't understand your comparison to youtubers? They get paid for their work, and complain when the platform demonetizes their videos without being transparent in their reasoning.
I understand if you meant that they were complaining about their views decreasing, or their content not being compatible with the guidelines of the platform, but that is in my experience not that common.
It feels to me like that part of your argument is just a subjective stab at the value of youtube as a job in society.
>...a stab at the value of youtube as a job in society
Yes. Not to pick on youtube - it's just the strongest of the group of entities of which I'd include buzzfeed, vice and the rest.
The world is saturated with entertainment, and it's not good for anyone.
It's not good that kids grow up wanting to be youtubers not scientists.
It's not good for the entertainers who chase the algorithm instead of building things or helping people.
YouTube is a lot of different things for different people, and serves niches that would simply go unserved without them. Comparing them to Vice - well maybe that is valid for some clickbait “news” channel but I like to watch - as one example - instructive chess videos that pretty much wouldn’t exist on any other platforms.
> It's not good that kids grow up wanting to be youtubers not scientists.
To be fair, it’s not like being scientist is overly appealing. You have years of education which is potentially very expensive all for what? Crappy paying postgrad work and a modern academic career m or maybe a meh job in industry research that still is probably not paying that great.
Not that I think they’d be better off in YouTube, at least on average.
The world has moved on. Rick Beato also laments about the future of musicianship because of software tooks and how kids prefer to watch someone do something more than to do the thing.
I'm not saying the content is bad. I'm saying the expectation to get paid for content is bad. Grant is still going to do 3blue1brown even if he doesn't get paid because he cares about math and about teaching math. If he quit his day job it would force him to make new videos he wasn't 100% passionate about; it would force him to change his content to suit the algorithm.
That seems unfair. The profession and the platform are not the same thing - obviously there is a lot of risk in building your business on someone else's platform, but what are their other options?
I get this feeling when youtubers complain about being demonetized. Like, why were you monetized in the first place? Shouldn't this be a hobby for you, where your day job is actually helping people?
Once a profession is named, there seems to be an expectation of durability. But market fundamentalism allows for no such constants. All professions are subject to the market; if there is no demand, if there is no money, there is no profession. In any event, it's a problem that definitely sorts itself out.