10 ms·
The Passion Economy and the Future of Work
- SolaceQuantum 7y agoThis 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.
- gruglife 7y agoSeeing how a16z just gave Substack a ton of money, got to do some self promotion.
- codingdave 7y agoIt is thinly veiled marketing for a handful of sites they wanted to call out.
- smacktoward 7y agoIt'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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient).
- troquerre 7y agoCreator economics frequently follow power law dynamics. The same can be observed for Shopify and Youtube creators. ie Substack's revenue is based off of how much their aggregate creator revenue is, not on the distribution of that revenue across their creators. So it's not that relevant to look at the average amount creators make. Actually, it's better for these platforms to have the average be low bc it means they have exposure to as many creators as possible. The cost of supporting each marginal creator is basically zero so they want to maximize their odds of onboarding a creator that will be successful even if that means onboarding hundreds of unsuccessful creators to get them.
- maximente 7y agoit'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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- joe_the_user 7y agoIndeed, another factor to consider is that in a medium like this, "top earner" is going to change constantly. The attention of podcast consumers is going to shift constantly, $50K or $100K in a month hardly guarantees that on a continuing basis. Anyway, "passion" is usually/often code for "doing what you love instead of being paid", which may be fun but doesn't have a good retirement plan.
- mc32 7y agoYeah, 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.
- dpflan 7y agoI think “passion” and the rise of startups the past decade are correlated, there is the cult of passion converted into “culture” as a lure. It appeals greatly to younger employees. The economic state and money looking for more money is fuel for the “passion culture lure”.
- ticmasta 7y agoI believe (as do many others) that they've got the causation backwards; you don't search for work you're already passionate about, you grow passion by doing meaningful work that is deeply rewarding. I read most of the post with the viewpoint that the author had a vested interest in a very specific interpretation of what's essential the story of the internet: the long tail. I see no evidence that the entire market for any of the examples has exploded in total value, which to me means we're just seeing a shift in delivery channels. Traditionally authors all made very little while a few best sellers took the majority of the money, same with musicians. If the new currency is audience, consumption or some other metric why does that indicate the fundamental distribution has changed?
- pojzon 7y agoIf possible I would like to steal that?: "You don't look for a work you're already passionate about. You grow passion by doing meaningful work that is deeply rewarding." This is a great advice for many management ppl.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> you don't search for work you're already passionate about, you grow passion by doing meaningful work that is deeply rewarding. And how does the work become "meaningful and deeply rewarding"? For some, it may come just from repetition. Others manage to abstract their occupation away and source the meaning and rewards from families and lifestyle their work supports. But there are people for whom this doesn't work, and this is where I believe the "passion" mindset comes from. A lot of jobs are not only not meaningful, they're net harmful to society. And most people don't get to choose what they're working on anyway, economic considerations make the choice for them. So there's a tension.
- treelovinhippie 7y agoMy 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.
- machawinka 7y agoExactly, and if you dare to suggest that model they will label you communist.
- Porthos9K 7y agoAnd, as usual, creatives who are unpopular because they're lousy at marketing themselves get bupkis. Capitalism, fuck yeah!
- zarro 7y agoWhenever 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.
- CuriouslyC 7y agoThe distribution of ability is a bell curve (which has small tails, btw) but the distribution of rewards is basically power law. The result is that people only slightly different in ability can have wildly different rewards.
- zarro 7y agoPower laws can arise as natural consequences of aggregation of high variance data. General Central Limit Theorem says distributions of data with limited variability tend to follow the Normal (bell-shaped, or Gaussian) curve, but aggregation of high (or infinite) variance data leads to power laws. Thus, the bell curve is normal for low-variance data and the power law curve is normal for high-variance data.
- ticmasta 7y agogenerally these types of activities don't actually follow a bell curve but a power law where a very tiny population reap the vast majority of the rewards and everyone else shares the scraps, trailing off and approaching zero. Think 10 YT videos get 10 billion views and the rest share a billion, with the mean being somewhere close to zero
- s17n 7y agoThe reason that A16z is taking about top earners rather than median is that their audience is the people building the platforms. These people care about the total revenue which you'd expect to be a power law distribution dominated by the top earners, so the max is the most important number.
- undefined3840 7y agoSelecting a few outliers and calling it a “trend” is ridiculous. Honestly I wish there was a stricter policy on HN for posting corporate content marketing puff pieces. These a16z blog posts do nothing more than hype companies in their portfolio.
- ticmasta 7y agoWell they have to do something to make up for their continued decline in performance. You don't get to stay the industry darling by living on your historical record forever...
- munk-a 7y agoHype... except when their BS is transparent and poorly researched. But hey, at least there are a few interesting discussions spurred on by this non-article.
- rdiddly 7y agoYou can flag it.
- xwdv 7y agoGod I hate this stuff. It preaches the wrong ideas to people and then screws them up for life. We need to think less about “the future of work” and think more about “the history of work”. What people need to embrace is the Discipline Economy. It’s simple. Find something that is of value to society and pays enough, then work everyday to be better and better at it until you reach your maximum potential, and you will be rewarded. No passion required. You just get up and do it, every workday. And at the end of the day, clock out and go do whatever you want. You don’t need to be doing something you like, you need to be doing something that sustains you. If that also happens to be something you like, then that is a gift, similar to being tall, or smart, or attractive. Life will be easier for you then, but that is not the default. Someone still has to shovel the piles of shit or dig a ditch. The Passion Economy appeals to people who don’t ask what they can do for society, but rather what society can do for them. It’s selfish, and unsustainable. Passion doesn’t last forever. Discipline does.
- ticmasta 7y agoWork hard? Incremental progress? Contribute to society? How can you possibly hope to disrupt work with these types of values? </s>
- mark_l_watson 7y agoI sort of agree with you, we tend to develop passion for things after we achieve a high skill level. That said, it is OK to peruse things that we might be passionate about but not good at. I am not a good musician. After forty years, I mostly gave up on playing the guitar, and took up two easier instruments, didgeridoo and Native American flute. I will never be really good at these instruments either but it felt good when friends asked me to play didgeridoo at their wedding when the bride was walking down the aisle. I have a keen interest in future society/economy/technology and in a world with guaranteed minimum income, I hope people spend time on niche passion projects and not just binge on Netflix and HBO.
- treerock 7y ago> Find something that is of value to society and pays enough, then work everyday to be better and better at it until you reach your maximum potential, and you will be rewarded. Unless society changes what it values, at which point you are fucked. https://genius.com/Pete-seeger-john-henry-lyrics https://genius.com/Pete-seeger-john-henry-lyrics
- taurath 7y agoThey need to talk about the network effect, and where the power is centered here. Hint - its not with the content creators, nor the users. Its the platform. Its the rent-seeking behavior on the part of the platforms that causes every entry in this space to rise when there's investment money, and then fall when they have to start making the money back and implement creator and user unfriendly mechanisms. Then the content creators have to replatform, which can lose them much of their audience. We can break the cycle with self-hosted platform-agnostic tools. Most everything these platforms do is available off the shelf - the differentiations don't actually matter. The content creators aren't being given an audience, they build audiences for the platform. Everything the platform does once it has to start making money is in service to the platform and the investors, not the "workers", or the users.
- doomlaser 7y ago> Most everything these platforms do is available off the shelf - the differentiations don't actually matter Except, often critically, the very network effect that those platforms help foster. Try self-hosting a viral video and see how far it gets you. It's much harder to break through. This very discussion is taking place on a platform that focuses a network effect for a very specific but sizeable audience. How would it take place otherwise?
- taurath 7y agoPeople post external links in social media all the time. You don't have to be where people start, you can just be where people end up.
- doomlaser 7y agoAlmost every social media platform now has its own video hosting service, and that is the service privileged with automatic-playing or otherwise friction-free playing video content. As a result, on, say, Twitter or Facebook, the videos that get the most virality are the ones being hosted natively on that social network's corresponding video platform. I agree with you that it would be better if everyone self-hosted and was able to charge what they wanted. I think it may be more realistic to hope for more platforms—competing with each other—to whittle down the rent they are able to seek from the creators that bring them value. Make them compete for the content creators. And, if they grow too unwieldy, regulate them (or threaten to) so that they set reasonable ground rules.
- cryptica 7y agoWe should think about what is going to happen to all those people (let's face it, the vast majority) who are not passionate about anything... Or worse; who are simply not quite passionate enough... Taking into account a competitive global environment with many traditional/productive jobs disappearing and being replaced by a much smaller number of extremely hard-to-get content creator jobs, I don't think it's going to end well. It's starting to look like that Black Mirror episode where people end up living in a box and generaring electricity with their legs.
- matz1 7y agoThen at least you should keep searching for it until you find it or die. There are virtually unlimited thing you can do in life, its unlikely there is nothing one is passionate about.
- munk-a 7y agoBeing able to discover and follow your passion requires a stability of life that most people stuck in grindy jobs are deprived of. Yes there are virtually unlimited things and I wish more people had the confidence and financial independence to pursue them - but being stuck in the grind makes it hard to see a way out... hence the abundance of depression in the modern world, most people are the cogs being crushed under the brutal machine, rather than those privileged to work in high margin industries that let them invest in themselves.
- matz1 7y agoIf you born poor/ugly/whatever doesn't mean you just give up, whatever state you are in you have to keep searching for it. Sure its can be hard, but there is nothing better you can do other than just keep trying.
- munk-a 7y agoI would love it if people felt confident in doing that. The problem is that a lot of people get caught in a dark place when they're backed into a corner and can't get themselves out. I don't know if it's ever happened to you personally but people can become accepting of a bad situation simply because they find it too difficult to find a better one - most people (IMO nearly all) can get into this sort of a rut and may need help to get themselves out.
- impatientduck 7y agoComplete and total nonsense. "Passion" is a buzzword meaning work for free until we deem you worthy of payment - and that time frame keeps getting longer and longer as the race to the bottom in labor keeps happening. NAFTA was a prelude to the internet revolution. Like programming? Well, someone living where rent is a tenth of yours can do it better than you. Enjoy poverty!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- toptal 7y agoWe wrote an article on this topic and we call it The Talent Economy - https://topt.al/kcV6G https://topt.al/kcV6G We believe our arguments are a bit more pointed and speak to the dynamics of the gig economy vs. [name your catchy other economy here].
- gridlockd 7y ago> The top-earning writer on the paid newsletter platform Substack earns more than $500,000 a year from reader subscriptions. By contrast, 99.99% of writers earn either nothing or very little from their "passion", because approximately nobody has the time and interest to read all of their stuff. It's a terrible career choice that people should be dissuaded from more actively. I would imagine it's the same or similar for all other "passion gigs".
- TrackerFF 7y agoGlobal "passion economy" sounds like the devaluation of creative work. Look no further than fiverr
- ozim 7y agoBut creative work was always devalued. People with money don't want to pay top dollar, unless you are already dead painter or Banksy. Companies often drag their feet and try to get away with not paying at all, counting that you will give up or they will find another sucker. Top talented are rare, just enough talented are plenty. Good opportunities are rare, most of capital is in hands of top 1% so capital is also rare.
- john_moscow 7y agoI don't think the economy in this segment is changing drastically. Top handful of rockstars, actors, athletes, soccer players, etc were always compensated very well, while the median ones weren't. Not like you can get a Master in Talk Show Hosting degree and get a more or less predictable career path similar to the engineering/medicine degrees. Come to think of it, the rise of multiple competing content platforms would actually lower the top performers' revenues due to the audience splintering. Given that A16Z likely holds some stake in the mentioned businesses, I would treat this as simply another piece of marketing material for some upcoming IPOs.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y agoIt's kind of subjective. Decades ago, CEO's made 20:1 compared to workers. That's "compensated very well". Today is 200:1. It's still very well. A whole order of magnitude better. In developed countries, today's winners win bigger. The losers stagnate. Globally, many have been lifted out of poverty. The poor in developing countries are doing better. The wealthy are doing better. The middle class is not.
- barry-cotter 7y agoDecades ago CEOs consumed well over twenty times as much as the average worker even though their official wages were only twenty times as high because of a huge range of tax exemptions and write offs that were eliminated in the 80s.
- doomlaser 7y agoI agree that there is definitely a pareto distribution in earnings—and there probably always has been for creative work. I don't know if this means that there are less people making a living in each respective field. For that, I'd like to see some hard data. How fat is the tail of the power curve, anyway? And how many curves are out there?
- acephal 7y agoStrange that UFC has the same exact reward model.
- fake_satire 7y agodumb article. individuality has always been monitized. if u have bad attitude and no one can get along with you, you'll be fired from USPS. all hype jargon and moonshots. 0 stars.
- jeffml84 7y agoHere's how you solve the health insurance crisis. The hard part is getting doctors to learn marketing, or having personalities.
- rdiddly 7y agoThey lost me at the word "enterprization."
- stakhanov 7y agoThey start the first paragraph saying "The TOP earning writer here makes X ..." then "The TOP content creator there makes Y ..." The second paragraph says "This is INDICATIVE of ..." How does the logical fallacy here not occur to them? That they use a MAXIMUM to describe a distribution in the way that a person who is not completely out of touch with reality would use a median or mean. Silicon Valley megalomania par excellence.
- brosinante 7y agoReframe the conversation by calling it a "passion" economy, then conveniently avoid mentioning what a representative "passionario" will earn. It obviously occured to them, but they can't "monetize individuality" if you actually let people know there's no money in it for most.
- stakhanov 7y ago...well, this publication is not really directed at would-be recruits for the passion economy but rather meant for circulation within the entrepreneurial community. There's a part of me that HOPES that there is a nefarious design here, instead of the industry having gone completely crazy and having lost touch with reality like this article would indicate.
- apache99 7y agoAnyone know where to hook up technical writing gigs? We dont have stripe in my country so I cant get payouts on medium. I used to write for an Elasticsearch blog. Would love to get paid for technical articles. I got a whole portfolio and plenty of passion.