11 ms·

You “create content” if what you’re after is just money, and “content” is this malleable goo you have to produce and shove it down the algorithm so that it gets

You “create content” if what you’re after is just money, and “content” is this malleable goo you have to produce and shove it down the algorithm so that it gets “traffic”, another form of goo that gets “funneled” and “converted” into money. In other words, it loses all (human) meaning. So yes, if you care at all, you shouldn’t “create content”. You should be writing essays, recording tutorials, training, music, conversations, etc. the kind of things you care about, for an audience whose attention you don’t take for granted, hoping that they too will care at least a little. If they do, they will pay you because they will rather part with money than part with your work.

CodingJeebus 2mo ago
There are all kinds of people out there generating meaningful content on their own terms that will never get picked up by the algorithm. I hate the content mills as much as anyone else, but the fact is that they exist because internet economy rewards them. The entire ecosystem incentivizes the soulless "goo" you describe over the meaningful work people are doing. Ice T said it best: "Don't hate the player, hate the game".
- ktallett 2mo ago
  You don't need to do that as an activity. You can earn money doing something more useful.
  - TACIXAT 2mo ago
    Entertaining people is useful! In my opinion, it is probably one of the most ethical ways to make money. I think game development is in that category too. It is a very pure field where you are giving a consumer something they enjoy and seek out.
    - ktallett 2mo ago
      Ethical all depends on if what you are doing is really you. Whether you are being you. The same way with any creative pursuit. There is a significant difference between creativity for creativities sake and creativity marketed to exploit.
      - t0mpr1c3 2mo ago
        Do you mean authentic?
- wolvesechoes 2mo ago
  "Don't hate the player, hate the game" I believe lack of social ostracization is one of the reason we find ourselves in current state. Because players are what perpetuates the game.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Capital is far more powerful than social ostracization. Consider the middle east situation: most of the money is on the opposite side from most of the people. You get kicked out of most groups for advertising that you support the money side. But the money side still won because it paid off everyone important.
  - oska 2mo ago
    Yes, I've always disliked this saying. People have agency. They can always refuse to play the game (and that is precisely what many great people chose to do).
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      Refusing to play the game just means you lose the game. It isn't a third state, it's a resignation.
      - oska 2mo ago
        You can't resign from a position you never held or a game you never entered into
        inigyou 2mo ago
        Oh you're in the game. Your choice is whether to win the game or lose the game. Also if you lose the game you die. It's like Jumanji. Pretending the tiger isn't real is not a viable option.
        pseudalopex 2mo ago
        Life is not 1 game with 2 ends. And everyone dies.
randysalami 2mo ago
I'm sorry but my first thought after reading: "You should be writing essays, recording tutorials, training, music, conversations, etc. the kind of things you care about... If they do, they will pay you because they will rather part with money than part with your work" Is an AI company webcrawler sucking up your novel work, for free, only to goop it out to everyone else without compensating you a dime. And while you worked so hard to genuinely create something, that won't be amplified by internet algorithms so no real human will see it, another person will do a dance or be funny, edgy, unethical, controversial, and get 1000x the human eyeballs, money, and power - probably using AI to write the very words they regurgitate. It's a sad world after all.
TACIXAT 2mo ago
The flexibility you bemoan in content creation is the exact same search people perform when running a startup. Finding product-market fit is a search process and content creators do the same thing. They see what customers like and focus in on that. Is it somewhat soulless? For sure. It is not unique to content creation though.
xboxnolifes 2mo ago
I agree with everything except the last sentence. Humans are not rational agents, doubly so when it comes to money and spending. There are many communities where charging even a nominal fee for your work leads to backlash due to built up expectations of free contribution.
- figassis 2mo ago
  I'm not sure if they're irrational. Payment/subscription fatigue is a thing. Today it seems like you have to pay to breathe. It's suffocating. I often go through periods where I reject every money ask compulsively, the same way as I would "disconnect". It's quite interesting how quality of life gets inverted in non intuitive ways. If you travel to a "developing country" you notice you are no longer bombarded with ads. Watching YouTube is close to the premium experience, bc the country presents no ad revenue to Google. You then travel to a "developed" country and you can't watch a 5 minute video without watching 2 ads. Everything is a transaction, it is too easy to transact. People used to just write, to just make music. Sure, they need to eat, but they lie. You hear people that make insane amouns of money asking for a coffee. imho, writing is a thing you to to share knowledge, to have a conversation, to learn, etc. It is a way to also get people to know you better, and maybe learn about the things you do that they would want to pay for. So unless writing is your full time job, asking money for it leaves a bad taste.
  - xboxnolifes 2mo ago
    > I'm not sure if they're irrational. Payment/subscription fatigue is a thing. Payment fatigue is an irrational thing, at least in the context of what a rational economic agent is. Rationally, you pay for what you value, at roughly what it is valued to you, and you don't pay for you want you don't value. Transactions are fatiguing precisely because we are not rational agents. Humans live primarily on emotion and ingrained behavior, with small bursts of applying logic.
    - zamadatix 2mo ago
      It's not the core idea of "fatigue of paying for value" itself but something more akin to "fatigue of keeping track of which things were actually worth paying for, which starts to take more value than you can create with the same amount of time or could get with a few well thought out larger payments". It's usually brought up around subscriptions precisely because they are a lot of work to track but easy to forget.
georgeecollins 2mo ago
I am so glad someone said this! I get really mad when a PR person writes the word content in the press release for my company. We don't create content. To me "content" means you don't know what you are making or you are very embarrassed about it. We make art or entertainment that people pay for. In general there are two axis I think about in media. One axis is originality, the other axis is durability. Very unoriginal is a transcription of information everyone already knows. Investigative reporting that reveals new information is very original. A creative story is original. Durability is how long the thing will have some value. They can put the Wizard of Oz in Sphere today. A Tik Tok video will probably be forgotten in a day or two. You could call that "quality" but that's harder to define and measure. Value is created in being as original and durable as possible. Platforms want you to be the opposite-- that's the slop they call content.
- Imustaskforhelp 2mo ago
  > There is a tug of war between people and platform as such across this diagonal axis. People want value whereas platforms want content, the incentives between a viewer and platform/content creator are getting broken because of the overhead incentive of the platform/content creator for money aka content. There are some places where its not the case, namely wikipedia (aside from its recent controversies) and archive.org both being non-profit, though there are issues with non-profits as well in terms of their funding and other things. Open source being the example of it in terms of how much value it gives us but there is a lack of funding of that as well. There has to be some balance in all of it but it seems that the balance is binary-like. Either we are seeing mostly open source underfunded software or we are seeing platforms/content-creators using their power for more money. It also comes to the point that GP comment makes though, content is created by the expectation of profit and so that is its benchmark but value is created for something more emotional but people also like to eat food and would prefer to do so doing work on open source/the work they like for example but then it also pushes itself into content boundary rather than value. @tombert has a comment about it which says that they are writing blogs and creating value for the sake of it because they have job on the side and its just the first example that I got reading this thread but many people actually create value as such, but as such they are creating value "in-spite" of incentives and the actual incentives are working on the opposite side of value creation. It is similar to how actual Musicians in music industry are really exploited by all the systems around them yet they still create Music (value) in-spite of all of it because creating music (value) means more to them than all the issues and there is something human about creating value/music. Here's an extremely good video about it[0] if money follows content and content follows money, perhaps content is just value which follows money and being shallow rather than something deeper and all these dynamics that interact with each other are leading to a tug of war in the first place. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx7baJMQuVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx7baJMQuVA
tombert 2mo ago
A long time ago Simon Peyton Jones said Haskell tries to "avoid success at all costs". He was being cheeky, but it honestly is how I try and approach most of what I do that isn't directly related to my employment (as a software person). My blog posts are just for me; I don't market them, I don't expect anyone else to read them, I don't spam links to all my friends every time I post anything. I have no idea if my writing could make any money in any universe, but since it's not my source of income I don't want to be beholden any kind of "monetization incentives".
- ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
  Same here. I also write software for free, but it’s not a cry in the dark. It’s serious, ship-grade software, released into the App Store, and used by thousands. It’s just not designed to make money.
  - cindyllm 2mo ago
    [dead]
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    I'd seriously suggest charging money for anything in the app store to offset the money it costs to publish in the app store. You can also offer a free version on your own website.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
      Yeah, but it's a long story. I do it for a very specific reason. I'm retired, and don't need the money. It's enjoyable, and many people benefit.
- flir 2mo ago
  Commonplace book. Mine just happens to be (theoretically) public. (This takes a lot of pressure off - I publish notes, half-finished thoughts, stuff I'll "get around to later" with no shame).
pessimizer 2mo ago
> If they do, they will pay you because they will rather part with money than part with your work. Paying for access to "content" that isn't capital is a bizarre business model. The only reason it ever existed is because the medium (paper, videotape) was expensive. The smart reason you pay people is because you want them to continue producing, not because you want to continue consuming. If I have something to say, it's a favor people are doing for me when they read it. In the real world, you beg for people to listen to you. Influential people already know this. I don't sponsor people who do journalism or write about politics so I can entertain myself. I don't need them to continually convince me of things I already believe, and any entertainment that I get from the uncovering of corruption is prurient. The reason I send them money is so that other people might come to believe what I believe, and so that other people will see the corruption that I disapprove of. Most other free "content creation" is in fact people advertising themselves as useful capital, hoping to be acquired by other people who think that they can make a profit. "Content creation" is a cargo cult; if you're lucky, 1) somebody sees you as capital and buys you, or 2) somebody else who shares your ability to profit off a related range of content notices you, and you create a mutually beneficial community. If you're unlucky, you just do random stuff with no object. Or I should say very lucky, because you're already being subsidized by someone else - the proof is that you're eating and not cooking. There's always been way too much "content," long before the internet. In fact, the internet is currently in the midst of an orgy of content destruction in order to protect capital, while criminals are the ones attempting to preserve and distribute that content.
- vintermann 2mo ago
  > The smart reason you pay people is because you want them to continue producing, not because you want to continue consuming. I've said this a long time. I also don't want to be "gilding the lily": if someone makes plenty of money making the "content" I like, I would like to redirect my contribution to marginal work, something nice that almost doesn't get made. There should not be "content" multimillionaires, that's a failure of our collective incentive structures.
__rito__ 2mo ago
What you are saying is true. But YouTube/FB algorithms are deliberately skewed towards regular posters. It's like your content of love that you produce once or twice a month won't be shown to the users at all. Where do I get the time after job, family, friends and self-study? So I don't create content like that at all. I write. And that's all. But I also want to make videos. The recording, editing timeline is way too high. And then if your stuff is not shown to anybody, that's a huge bummer.
- mc3301 2mo ago
  I follow many creators who only post a handful of times (if that) a year. They get tons of views, because the content is well made. Stuff Made Here Bobby Fingers Boy Boy Michael Reeves ..to name a few off the top of my head (Of course, theses are mostly HUGE channels)
- butlike 2mo ago
  I would say creating content isn't important until you reach a critical mass of users (at which point it might help you stay relevant), since I don't think it converts well when you're a smaller creator.
inigyou 2mo ago
> malleable goo I see you read https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/
pj_mukh 2mo ago
"so that it gets “traffic”, another form of goo that gets “funneled” and “converted” into money." How is this any different from a small business hot dog stand, setting up outside a game to get more of the "traffic" instead of paying rent somewhere busy. You're a small business trying to get eyeballs, you do what you gotta do and call it what you want, instead of paying for ads like the big boys.
- duggan 2mo ago
  Hot dog stands don't often masquerade as creative expression.
  - pj_mukh 2mo ago
    who gets to define what's real creative expression and what's not?
QuantumGood 2mo ago
At a certain point in the process, a little additional content multiplies the value of your existing efforts. But that is misunderstood (survivor bias?) as "make lots of content, because the successful people did".
butlike 2mo ago
To that end, I don't like creating that corpus of work _for social media_. As a musician, I don't think it converts to ticket sales. At a certain level it's required to keep a musician's name in the conversation if you're, say, a big EDM artist, but at that level it's nothing more than just a "dumb piece of content" without any of the labor of love you mentioned. So then where as a musician does the content go on the internet if it doesn't convert? I feel I'd be better off putting up posters outside venues or some of those roller glue posters on boards in the artsy part of town.
hotsalad 2mo ago
What this reminded me of was the fiasco of the McDonald's CEO referring to the Big Arch as a "product". Is it a product? Sure. That is about the least specific word he could have used for it, and it implies that he doesn't care that it is a cheeseburger, but that any type of item produced by any company he happened to lead would have made him equally happy. It is likely true that he is just there to run a business and feels no sense of pride in its specific offerings, but the accidental honesty was amusing.
- satvikpendem 2mo ago
  No, it's just that it was an accidental leakage of business vernacular, like product managers or when managers in a company talk about a certain product they're working on.
Ferret7446 2mo ago
That's a bit too cynical and missing the point. "Content" is what people want. You create what people want. > You should be writing essays, recording tutorials, training, music, conversations, etc. the kind of things you care about, for an audience whose attention you don’t take for granted, hoping that they too will care at least a little. If they do, they will pay you because they will rather part with money than part with your work. Yeah, that's called content. "the kind of things you care about, for an audience whose attention you don’t take for granted, hoping that they too will care at least a little" doesn't quite roll off the tongue.
satvikpendem 2mo ago
This is no different than a job except for some reason people attribute this type of work with "meaning" and not others. Yes, if you want to make money, you must produce something others want. If you want to make something with "meaning" then do so once you're financially rich. Your comment is literally the starving artist stereotype.

CodingJeebus 2mo ago

There are all kinds of people out there generating meaningful content on their own terms that will never get picked up by the algorithm. I hate the content mills as much as anyone else, but the fact is that they exist because internet economy rewards them. The entire ecosystem incentivizes the soulless "goo" you describe over the meaningful work people are doing. Ice T said it best: "Don't hate the player, hate the game".

ktallett 2mo ago
You don't need to do that as an activity. You can earn money doing something more useful.
- TACIXAT 2mo ago
  Entertaining people is useful! In my opinion, it is probably one of the most ethical ways to make money. I think game development is in that category too. It is a very pure field where you are giving a consumer something they enjoy and seek out.
  - ktallett 2mo ago
    Ethical all depends on if what you are doing is really you. Whether you are being you. The same way with any creative pursuit. There is a significant difference between creativity for creativities sake and creativity marketed to exploit.
    - t0mpr1c3 2mo ago
      Do you mean authentic?
wolvesechoes 2mo ago
"Don't hate the player, hate the game" I believe lack of social ostracization is one of the reason we find ourselves in current state. Because players are what perpetuates the game.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Capital is far more powerful than social ostracization. Consider the middle east situation: most of the money is on the opposite side from most of the people. You get kicked out of most groups for advertising that you support the money side. But the money side still won because it paid off everyone important.
- oska 2mo ago
  Yes, I've always disliked this saying. People have agency. They can always refuse to play the game (and that is precisely what many great people chose to do).
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Refusing to play the game just means you lose the game. It isn't a third state, it's a resignation.
    - oska 2mo ago
      You can't resign from a position you never held or a game you never entered into
      - inigyou 2mo ago
        Oh you're in the game. Your choice is whether to win the game or lose the game. Also if you lose the game you die. It's like Jumanji. Pretending the tiger isn't real is not a viable option.
        pseudalopex 2mo ago
        Life is not 1 game with 2 ends. And everyone dies.

randysalami 2mo ago

I'm sorry but my first thought after reading: "You should be writing essays, recording tutorials, training, music, conversations, etc. the kind of things you care about... If they do, they will pay you because they will rather part with money than part with your work" Is an AI company webcrawler sucking up your novel work, for free, only to goop it out to everyone else without compensating you a dime. And while you worked so hard to genuinely create something, that won't be amplified by internet algorithms so no real human will see it, another person will do a dance or be funny, edgy, unethical, controversial, and get 1000x the human eyeballs, money, and power - probably using AI to write the very words they regurgitate. It's a sad world after all.

TACIXAT 2mo ago

The flexibility you bemoan in content creation is the exact same search people perform when running a startup. Finding product-market fit is a search process and content creators do the same thing. They see what customers like and focus in on that. Is it somewhat soulless? For sure. It is not unique to content creation though.

xboxnolifes 2mo ago

I agree with everything except the last sentence. Humans are not rational agents, doubly so when it comes to money and spending. There are many communities where charging even a nominal fee for your work leads to backlash due to built up expectations of free contribution.

figassis 2mo ago
I'm not sure if they're irrational. Payment/subscription fatigue is a thing. Today it seems like you have to pay to breathe. It's suffocating. I often go through periods where I reject every money ask compulsively, the same way as I would "disconnect". It's quite interesting how quality of life gets inverted in non intuitive ways. If you travel to a "developing country" you notice you are no longer bombarded with ads. Watching YouTube is close to the premium experience, bc the country presents no ad revenue to Google. You then travel to a "developed" country and you can't watch a 5 minute video without watching 2 ads. Everything is a transaction, it is too easy to transact. People used to just write, to just make music. Sure, they need to eat, but they lie. You hear people that make insane amouns of money asking for a coffee. imho, writing is a thing you to to share knowledge, to have a conversation, to learn, etc. It is a way to also get people to know you better, and maybe learn about the things you do that they would want to pay for. So unless writing is your full time job, asking money for it leaves a bad taste.
- xboxnolifes 2mo ago
  > I'm not sure if they're irrational. Payment/subscription fatigue is a thing. Payment fatigue is an irrational thing, at least in the context of what a rational economic agent is. Rationally, you pay for what you value, at roughly what it is valued to you, and you don't pay for you want you don't value. Transactions are fatiguing precisely because we are not rational agents. Humans live primarily on emotion and ingrained behavior, with small bursts of applying logic.
  - zamadatix 2mo ago
    It's not the core idea of "fatigue of paying for value" itself but something more akin to "fatigue of keeping track of which things were actually worth paying for, which starts to take more value than you can create with the same amount of time or could get with a few well thought out larger payments". It's usually brought up around subscriptions precisely because they are a lot of work to track but easy to forget.

georgeecollins 2mo ago

I am so glad someone said this! I get really mad when a PR person writes the word content in the press release for my company. We don't create content. To me "content" means you don't know what you are making or you are very embarrassed about it. We make art or entertainment that people pay for. In general there are two axis I think about in media. One axis is originality, the other axis is durability. Very unoriginal is a transcription of information everyone already knows. Investigative reporting that reveals new information is very original. A creative story is original. Durability is how long the thing will have some value. They can put the Wizard of Oz in Sphere today. A Tik Tok video will probably be forgotten in a day or two. You could call that "quality" but that's harder to define and measure. Value is created in being as original and durable as possible. Platforms want you to be the opposite-- that's the slop they call content.

Imustaskforhelp 2mo ago
> There is a tug of war between people and platform as such across this diagonal axis. People want value whereas platforms want content, the incentives between a viewer and platform/content creator are getting broken because of the overhead incentive of the platform/content creator for money aka content. There are some places where its not the case, namely wikipedia (aside from its recent controversies) and archive.org both being non-profit, though there are issues with non-profits as well in terms of their funding and other things. Open source being the example of it in terms of how much value it gives us but there is a lack of funding of that as well. There has to be some balance in all of it but it seems that the balance is binary-like. Either we are seeing mostly open source underfunded software or we are seeing platforms/content-creators using their power for more money. It also comes to the point that GP comment makes though, content is created by the expectation of profit and so that is its benchmark but value is created for something more emotional but people also like to eat food and would prefer to do so doing work on open source/the work they like for example but then it also pushes itself into content boundary rather than value. @tombert has a comment about it which says that they are writing blogs and creating value for the sake of it because they have job on the side and its just the first example that I got reading this thread but many people actually create value as such, but as such they are creating value "in-spite" of incentives and the actual incentives are working on the opposite side of value creation. It is similar to how actual Musicians in music industry are really exploited by all the systems around them yet they still create Music (value) in-spite of all of it because creating music (value) means more to them than all the issues and there is something human about creating value/music. Here's an extremely good video about it[0] if money follows content and content follows money, perhaps content is just value which follows money and being shallow rather than something deeper and all these dynamics that interact with each other are leading to a tug of war in the first place. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx7baJMQuVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx7baJMQuVA

tombert 2mo ago

A long time ago Simon Peyton Jones said Haskell tries to "avoid success at all costs". He was being cheeky, but it honestly is how I try and approach most of what I do that isn't directly related to my employment (as a software person). My blog posts are just for me; I don't market them, I don't expect anyone else to read them, I don't spam links to all my friends every time I post anything. I have no idea if my writing could make any money in any universe, but since it's not my source of income I don't want to be beholden any kind of "monetization incentives".

ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
Same here. I also write software for free, but it’s not a cry in the dark. It’s serious, ship-grade software, released into the App Store, and used by thousands. It’s just not designed to make money.
- cindyllm 2mo ago
  [dead]
- inigyou 2mo ago
  I'd seriously suggest charging money for anything in the app store to offset the money it costs to publish in the app store. You can also offer a free version on your own website.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
    Yeah, but it's a long story. I do it for a very specific reason. I'm retired, and don't need the money. It's enjoyable, and many people benefit.
flir 2mo ago
Commonplace book. Mine just happens to be (theoretically) public. (This takes a lot of pressure off - I publish notes, half-finished thoughts, stuff I'll "get around to later" with no shame).

pessimizer 2mo ago

> If they do, they will pay you because they will rather part with money than part with your work. Paying for access to "content" that isn't capital is a bizarre business model. The only reason it ever existed is because the medium (paper, videotape) was expensive. The smart reason you pay people is because you want them to continue producing, not because you want to continue consuming. If I have something to say, it's a favor people are doing for me when they read it. In the real world, you beg for people to listen to you. Influential people already know this. I don't sponsor people who do journalism or write about politics so I can entertain myself. I don't need them to continually convince me of things I already believe, and any entertainment that I get from the uncovering of corruption is prurient. The reason I send them money is so that other people might come to believe what I believe, and so that other people will see the corruption that I disapprove of. Most other free "content creation" is in fact people advertising themselves as useful capital, hoping to be acquired by other people who think that they can make a profit. "Content creation" is a cargo cult; if you're lucky, 1) somebody sees you as capital and buys you, or 2) somebody else who shares your ability to profit off a related range of content notices you, and you create a mutually beneficial community. If you're unlucky, you just do random stuff with no object. Or I should say very lucky, because you're already being subsidized by someone else - the proof is that you're eating and not cooking. There's always been way too much "content," long before the internet. In fact, the internet is currently in the midst of an orgy of content destruction in order to protect capital, while criminals are the ones attempting to preserve and distribute that content.

vintermann 2mo ago
> The smart reason you pay people is because you want them to continue producing, not because you want to continue consuming. I've said this a long time. I also don't want to be "gilding the lily": if someone makes plenty of money making the "content" I like, I would like to redirect my contribution to marginal work, something nice that almost doesn't get made. There should not be "content" multimillionaires, that's a failure of our collective incentive structures.

__rito__ 2mo ago

What you are saying is true. But YouTube/FB algorithms are deliberately skewed towards regular posters. It's like your content of love that you produce once or twice a month won't be shown to the users at all. Where do I get the time after job, family, friends and self-study? So I don't create content like that at all. I write. And that's all. But I also want to make videos. The recording, editing timeline is way too high. And then if your stuff is not shown to anybody, that's a huge bummer.

mc3301 2mo ago
I follow many creators who only post a handful of times (if that) a year. They get tons of views, because the content is well made. Stuff Made Here Bobby Fingers Boy Boy Michael Reeves ..to name a few off the top of my head (Of course, theses are mostly HUGE channels)
butlike 2mo ago
I would say creating content isn't important until you reach a critical mass of users (at which point it might help you stay relevant), since I don't think it converts well when you're a smaller creator.

inigyou 2mo ago

> malleable goo I see you read https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/

pj_mukh 2mo ago

"so that it gets “traffic”, another form of goo that gets “funneled” and “converted” into money." How is this any different from a small business hot dog stand, setting up outside a game to get more of the "traffic" instead of paying rent somewhere busy. You're a small business trying to get eyeballs, you do what you gotta do and call it what you want, instead of paying for ads like the big boys.

duggan 2mo ago
Hot dog stands don't often masquerade as creative expression.
- pj_mukh 2mo ago
  who gets to define what's real creative expression and what's not?

QuantumGood 2mo ago

At a certain point in the process, a little additional content multiplies the value of your existing efforts. But that is misunderstood (survivor bias?) as "make lots of content, because the successful people did".

butlike 2mo ago

To that end, I don't like creating that corpus of work _for social media_. As a musician, I don't think it converts to ticket sales. At a certain level it's required to keep a musician's name in the conversation if you're, say, a big EDM artist, but at that level it's nothing more than just a "dumb piece of content" without any of the labor of love you mentioned. So then where as a musician does the content go on the internet if it doesn't convert? I feel I'd be better off putting up posters outside venues or some of those roller glue posters on boards in the artsy part of town.

hotsalad 2mo ago

What this reminded me of was the fiasco of the McDonald's CEO referring to the Big Arch as a "product". Is it a product? Sure. That is about the least specific word he could have used for it, and it implies that he doesn't care that it is a cheeseburger, but that any type of item produced by any company he happened to lead would have made him equally happy. It is likely true that he is just there to run a business and feels no sense of pride in its specific offerings, but the accidental honesty was amusing.

satvikpendem 2mo ago
No, it's just that it was an accidental leakage of business vernacular, like product managers or when managers in a company talk about a certain product they're working on.

Ferret7446 2mo ago

That's a bit too cynical and missing the point. "Content" is what people want. You create what people want. > You should be writing essays, recording tutorials, training, music, conversations, etc. the kind of things you care about, for an audience whose attention you don’t take for granted, hoping that they too will care at least a little. If they do, they will pay you because they will rather part with money than part with your work. Yeah, that's called content. "the kind of things you care about, for an audience whose attention you don’t take for granted, hoping that they too will care at least a little" doesn't quite roll off the tongue.

satvikpendem 2mo ago

This is no different than a job except for some reason people attribute this type of work with "meaning" and not others. Yes, if you want to make money, you must produce something others want. If you want to make something with "meaning" then do so once you're financially rich. Your comment is literally the starving artist stereotype.