There has always been filler entertainment that caters to the lowest denominator. The new medium types just allow for more of it. Maybe I'm in a very small minority, but I only consume HN and a heavily curated YouTube account.
I don't even see most of the viral content unless somebody else shows me. Anf since I don't have an account with most social media sites, they have to show me directly on their own devices. I also filter on all email with the word 'unsubscribe' and route it appropriately.
The short of it is: do better at filtering with allow listing or aggressive block lists. Consume content you search for. Or accept the fact that an algorithm will spoon feed you 99% filler.
I am still mad that I had to give up facebook because of the garbage. It was and is a great way to see what my old school friend's kids are doing (we never were close, and I've moved a long way away so I wouldn't call, but I still go back to visit every class reunion and seeing those pictures helps have something to talk about). However all the garbage has made the platform useless and I gave up. I spent a year trying to block it all, but I wasn't making progress.
"Nobody deserves to make money on the internet except some opinionated subset of people I deem worthy of it." Also, this utterly confuses what's basically spam content with "content creation". All in all, just odd conflations to make some point, doused in elitism.
It may surprise you to know there was a time when people created content for the sake of it. It appears you have missed the point of what you’re responding to.
Cool, they're still free to do so, just like people are free to make money on the internet from their works. And believe it or not, people are still creating things for free.
And these things are not incentivized by the platforms they are created on, and thus rarely seen by anyone. Slop is incentivized. So yes while I am free not to create slop, I’m also bombarded by it, and my own creative output is limited due to the incentives of these platforms.
It doesn’t seem to me you understood what this post was saying, and I don’t care to explain it further. The state of content will continue to degrade with this very oafish mindset.
Just wanted to say that I really appreciated your level-headed responses here, John (& I am also this “DevOps/Systems Engineer/SRE” … must be all that incident response training paying off, calm
is contagious and all that )
Popular things are widely appealing things, and it's not really gonna be any different in that regard in any medium. It's just the kind of stuff that appeals to the widest audience.
So, you just have to look. Do your part as a consumer. Again, believe it or not, but you do have to put in a bit more effort to look for stuff that might appeal more to you, creators, artists, musicians, rather than just complaining that things aren't served to you while doing nothing. Or you could just complain and wait for better algos or whatever, for somebody to do the curation job for you. Also, again, just so snobby. I'm sure your taste is oh so superior to everyone else.
> my own creative output is limited due to the incentives of these platforms
How so?
> It may surprise you to know there was a time when people created content for the sake of it.
What time did you have in mind when talking about this?
Yes, those times existed, and they still exist. But there was never a time where mainstream media (which has now shifted to happening to social media platforms) wasn't slop and molded by bad monetary incentives. And still during all that time talented creators kept on creating for the sake of it, while often ignored by the masses - a tale as old as time.
> Me, I’m happy with the reach I gained. I’m very happy about all the connections I found and people I got to know from social media over the years. But I can’t be bothered with platforms that allow obvious spam and highly manipulative content and have policies that value vapid interaction over real discourse and original content.
"We should be more than that", "real discourse", "original content". The point of the blog post is unclear. It has disjointed bolded section titles with a softly condescending main title. I would describe it as self-flagellation with a splash of nostalgia. Soft terms being thrown around so casually, I find it hard to distinguish from the maligned AI posts described - spelling error and all!
Tech does seem to harbor this weird disdain towards creative industries. "Designers" are looked down on as simply destroying the efficiency of UI and web layouts with wasteful bloat and eye candy, artists aren't "authentic" unless they suffer, anyone who isn't hand-crafting their HTML on a site they're serving from their living room is just a commercial parasite with nothing of value to offer, and everyone should give all of their work away for free regardless of how much time, effort and investment they put into it. And stop complaining when an AI comes along and rips your style off because you were just an elitist gatekeeping art to begin with, and are probably just a talentless hack.
The concept that someone could be passionate and authentic about their work and want or need to make a living at it just doesn't compute. Maybe it's something in the programmer/engineer mindset that sees anything beyond pure code and information as essentially puerile and meaningless.
Absolute rules have a high burden of proof and I don't think the article meets it. One of the better essays on the merits of content creation I'm familiar with is Gavin Howard's "To Broadcast or not to Broadcast" and it provides a respectable contrast:
Here’s what Richard Stallman had to say about these terms in his 1996 essay published in “Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard, M. Stallman”¹:
Content
> If you want to describe a feeling of comfort and satisfaction, by all means say “content,” but using it to describe written and other works of authorship embodies a specific attitude towards those works: that they are an interchangeable commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it treats the works themselves with disrespect.
> Those who use this term are often the publishers that push for increased copyright power in the name of the authors (“creators,” as they say) of the works. The term “content” reveals what they really feel.
> As long as other people use the term “content provider,” political dissidents can well call themselves “malcontent providers.”
Creator
> The term “creator” as applied to authors implicitly compares them to a deity (“the creator”). The term is used by publishers to elevate the authors’ moral stature above that of ordinary people, to justify increased copyright power that the publishers can exercise in the name of the authors.
Note: I have a paper copy of this book at home but I found very hard to find this text on the web via Duck Duck Go or Google. Thankfully, the Wikipedia article had links to the original.
Since RMS said it, I have no doubt that it reflects the general consensus of people on HN, but in general terms it seems a bit out of touch with reality. No one actually uses the term "creator" to imply some elevated divine right to copyright power, nor does "content" imply " an interchangeable commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money". This isn't how people think or act or use this language in the real world.
I think that’s his own particular sense of humour coming through. I don’t mind such idiosyncrasies in his writing as I know to expect it but I would agree that it’s not the best way of communicating to appeal to a mass audience (I’m upvoting your comment as it seems like you’re being unfairly downvoted). While RMS is a great thinker, he’s not the best spokesperson for the Free Software Foundation.
I've stopped using most social media but Twitter, it's still full of indie hackers and the content is good. But you have to be careful and immediately unfollow when you smell the kind of indie hacker who schedule their content for the sake of scheduling content. They're not real, they are not sharing their current thoughts, they are just following some playbooks on how to please the algo. Luckily they are often so obvious that it's quite easy to weed them out and just keep following the interesting ones. And yeah, stay away from the "For you" tab.
On the flip side Twitter is one form of social media I have never been attracted to.
Impossible to have deep conversations due to character limits, promotes really ephemeral discourse which taps into the everything-is-super-urgent FOMO dark pattern, and has so much low effort content to sift through due to its encouragement of brevity.
Long gone is the age where people created content for the sheer fun of it with no monetary expectation. Amongst some age groups this is now an entirely foreign concept, to the point they won’t believe you.
Given your replies throughout this thread, I get the impression that you don't filter or curate anything and just see a few things on the default youtube feed or whatever and judge everything else based on that.
There are so many good people, making good content, on several platforms. A bare minimum effort is required, just like when you visit a bookstore you have to take a little bit of time to find the book that is appealing to you.
I am a small content creator for the last ten years. You can read into my responses as you’d like, I am controlling my tone a lot here. I dont subscribe to slop feeds
Eh, I still do things like that. In fact, I just published an entire free platform for people interested in Stoic philosophy. It has free texts, exercises, a journal, and much more.
The thing is, though... people don't care. It currently has 15 users. And I've published it in a few groups with thousands of users... but nobody cared to click the link. Reddit and other communities absolutely refuse to allow you to share anything, even if it's a free product.
I can see why people just say F it, and start running ads and go the way of monetization.
One of the big problems with how easy it is to generate “content” is that the good stuff easily gets lost among the deluge of dross. Also, there’s no shortage of good quality content being produced so even if you find something good, it may not be the right time for that person.
E.g., I checked your Hacker News submissions and found your platform via your Show HN submission.¹ As someone interested in philosophy and the concepts of stoicism, it looks good but unfortunately I’m too busy at the moment and don’t have enough time to engage with it properly so I’ve bookmarked it to come back to it later.
The author seems to make up their mind early on that "content creator" = "slop creator".
I think there is a lot more use to the label than that, and the reason why some people in the space happily self-label as "content creators".
For one it creates a delineation to "influencers" with the contrast that a "content creator" _creates_ something. They also create _content_, which could on the one hand be seen as "anything that fills a void", or more positively "something that's interesting". Most of the examples that the author highlighted I would classify as non-content/slop.
I think "content creator" is also a good descriptor for people that work as "independent creators in the digital media space", whose activities spread across multiple social media platforms, and would thus be hard to pidgeon hole into just one of: youtuber, streamer, podcaster, etc. as people working in the space full time often do all of that.
Indeed, they are using a very restrictive and negative definition of the word. I totally get why many people dislike the term and don't want it applied to themselves, but as you say it does have a use and does not have to be negative.
I don't disagree with a lot in the post, but it is odd to tie it to the "creator" term.
Even allowing for what you've written here, it's still such an awful label because the two words are so vacuous. What is "content"? What is a "creator"? They're meaningless when stuck together. My own creative pursuits have meaningful descriptors: photographer (I take photos), music producer (I produce music), writer (I enjoy writing) etc. and each of these has a meaningful output - a piece of music, a photograph, a book. If someone calls themself a "content creator" it suggests that the actual nature and output of the "content" is unimportant, it's secondary to just "I must create something in order to shove it in front of other people, I don't care what it is, I just have to shove it at you". I also hate influencers.
If you are a successful content creator by default you are engaging in slop by the virtue of the fact that these platforms reward slop. if you don’t know what I mean, look at the gaming of the youtube algorithm and how every successful youtube video is titled in the exact same style. “You won’t BELIEVE what we did after THIS happened!” with a sloppified thumbnail image.
So what? That doesn't make the video itself bad (the "content" if you will).
You could easily aim the same criticism at books and book titles and cover art, which by the same standards is in a constant state of sloppified titles and cover art that never strays too far from the norm. But who cares? There's still enjoyable and valuable content in those books, regardless of how they represent on the outside.
I, too, hate the words "content creator" or (even worse) "creatives". Everyone makes things for others. Creatives are not a subset of humanity, every human is a creative human. Now, whether you can sell the things you create on gamified online markets is another question, but it sucks to conflate the pride at being able to do that, with the pride in creativity itself.
> “ Good thing I have this blog. Here is where I make the rules. Maybe this will get a lot of readers, maybe it won’t. I don’t make any money with it either way. It’s out of my head now, and that is what counts. Do wonderful things that make you happy, folks. Chasing the numbers will not give you any fulfilment. Quite the opposite.”
Comic books, original paperback books (crime/detective stories, westerns, science fiction, etc.), hip-hop,... all intended as disposable entertainment—the commodified, created content of its day.
These forms of media were work-for-hire projects owned by the publisher, paid at a rate per word or page. Assignment turned in and paid for (or not) and on to the next assignment. A volume game.
this is definitely true for genre fiction, especially when pulp magazines were still in business.
That doesn't preclude quality from coming out of it eventually - one of my favorite examples is Walter Miller's 'Canticle for Leibowitz' which was reworked from several of his pulp short stories into a single novel. It's a really great book! I think the incentive structure encouraged volume over quality, but quality still did matter. There wasn't the same algorithm-hacking incentive at play, and you still had to get your works past an editor and approved. Those are important distinctions!
that said, as an aside, im a little nonplussed by the inclusion of hiphop as opposed to, say, 'pop' or 'country', music.
I agree with you on hip-hop. It's very important to me. And it's great that it's become so ubiquitous. But it wasn't always like that. Early hip-hop was just music created extemporaneously at a party or a park jam. It wasn't even recorded. It didn't fit the format of "about 4 minutes and some seconds." And the whole mixtape era was music of the moment, not even an official release, mostly a promotional product.
We only suffer from these platforms because we put up with them.
Social media is not the be-all, end-all. There's a world of grass to touch outside of these walled gardens.
Hmm, I read the title as 'nobody should be doing porn' (with which I disagree -- everybody should do whatever they want).
Because I thought 'content creator' was synonymous with 'onlyfans model'. I was then genuinely surprised by the content of the article and by calling 'content creator' a generic term.
I'm not sure -- is it an ambiguous title, or is my context way off?
I find it surreally dystopian: there's no more food bloggers or travel bloggers, or even enthusiasts with something to share - there's only content creators creating content for consumption. Yet noone seems to be concerned at the reduction to this creator x consumer system.
I think the prevailing usage for content creator generally includes YouTubers, podcasters, bloggers, etc.
Though given the scare quotes I can see why you assumed it was being used euphemistically rather than “person who makes slop to feed an algorithmic feed”.
> The question is why you take part in social media.
> If your goal is to make money, good luck trying to compete with the deluge of AI slop.
> If your goal is to get reach as an influencer, this is also getting trickier as a lot of people want a slice of that pie. We are in a post Mr. Beast world and quite some ground has been scorched.
> If your goal is to use it as a source of passive income, there’s still some bits to gain, but you’d also have to keep abiding to the rules of the platforms.
And if you answered "Yes" to any of those, you are part of the reason social media is a huge social problem, and you should not have been allowed on it in the first place.
Templated UnitOfWorks should not complain about the factory(factory(factorys(plans and namingconventions))). The recipe of the entertainment rich mystery slob is not yours to ponder unless its rich in vitamin a(&d&d)
Yet he created content for his blog. A very basic and derivative post, adding nothing more to discussion on the internet than the social media engagement bait and AI slop he is criticizing.
I don't even see most of the viral content unless somebody else shows me. Anf since I don't have an account with most social media sites, they have to show me directly on their own devices. I also filter on all email with the word 'unsubscribe' and route it appropriately.
The short of it is: do better at filtering with allow listing or aggressive block lists. Consume content you search for. Or accept the fact that an algorithm will spoon feed you 99% filler.