That's cool, but I want people to be able to independently create content for me to enjoy, which is a bit less of a crock. That will probably takes all their time and they need to pay for ingredients for their pot. Bring on universal basic income I guess.
In my experience professionalising content creation (on youtube) hardly helps quality.
Usually they end up filming their cooking lessons hanging the latest Canon from a drone in their Dubai studio kitchen with nothing substantial left to say. Maybe people will stick around because they are still able to afford to outspend other creators on exotic ingredients and they're just looking for a familiar face to entertain them. I'm not familiar with cooking channels, but you'll see a lot of 'professional' music teachers on youtube eventually making an 'A=432 Hz' video. It's downright tragic how the urge to publish takes a hold of them.
They also usually will become clowns. Since people will stick around for the entertainment rather than educational value, I've seen a lot of professional content creators trying way too hard to be casual and approachable, incorporating idiosyncrasies and bloopers on purpose, then making fun of them. Eventually their video thumbnails will be them actually making funny faces.
It doesn't always have to be like that, and I'm not judging you for enjoying their content, just be aware that in the age of youtube you're soon dealing with basically corporations who couldn't care what they're selling, as long as they can keep selling it.
But there is already more excellent content that has already been created than you could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes. Do we really need to support people to create more? I feel like we can enjoy what we already have and don't need to continuously look for something new. If people really really really want to create something, they will find a way to do so.
> there is already more excellent content that has already been created than you could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes.
I hear this often. Where is this excellent content? 99% of things online recommendations float up for me is garbage. Sometimes I see some gems, but it's rare. Already years ago I was hearing people say that the only thing we need now is good content discovery. Screw any new content. We already have too much good stuff.
I'm starting to think that, if in all this time Internet giants haven't been able come up with a way to get to those hundreds of lifetimes of amazing content, maybe it doesn't actually exist?
Our tastes change over time. Some things that were great 10 years ago haven't aged well. There's a long tail. What's excellent for you isn't interesting to me, and so on. In a sum there might be more content than you can watch in a lifetime, but an intersection of that whole collection with a single person's momentary interests seems to be much much smaller.
Have you really read the entire Western Canon? Listened to the collective oeuvres of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart? Watched the AFI top 100 movies or IMDB’s top 1000? Watched all of The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad? Read the SF Masterworks Collection?
Is there any kind of cultural production, any genre that you like a lot more than most people? Because if there is there’s someone who likes it 100 times more than you and has made a list of the top 100 things in it. If you haven’t gone through multiple of these lists then you you’re not even trying to get through the enormous amount of fantastic content out there that is wildly disproportionately likely to be great, for you.
You underestimate how specific people's tastes can be. There are nano niches. For example what if I like the music of a person so much that I'd rather listen to that person for 100 hours than to anything else? Well, that's exactly what I'm doing but when the author has only ever published 12 songs each 3 min long then that means I've heard the songs over a hundred times already and unfortunately at some point I just get bored of a song. I wish I could enjoy them longer but for me it would be just as good if the same author released a new batch of songs.
You no longer enjoy that person’s music so much that you would rather listen to it than do anything else. It seems unlikely that all of your interests are so specific. If you have some more general tastes there will be lists of good stuff you should check out in those genres. If you love these 12 songs more than acting else but have listened to them so much that all joy has drained from them have you listened to songs others with taste recommend for those who love these songs?
Artistic taste is far from infinitely malleable but it’s flexible enough for many to appreciate metal, opera, pop and classical music. If your tastes are so narrow and specific you are in a tiny minority.
I understand the enjoyment of collecting stuff or completing lists compiled by other people, but that isn't connected to what I enjoy about art, so I'm still not finding this a fun suggestion.
Per this reasoning, producing The Wire or Breaking Bad and most of the "Western Canon" was already unnecessary. Humanity has produced enough written content in antiquity to keep you reading for a lifetime.
Yes, and? My point wasn’t about cultural production, it was about the availability of enormous amounts of excellent curated content. People will make art of various forms without remuneration, even without audience, for the love of creation. Greater rewards will lead to more. But there really is enough great work in antiquity to spend a lifetime on.
With that reasoning we should have stopped producing music after Bach, Mozart or Beethoven. Instead, our cultural context and technology evolved and so did our forms of expression. There will always be more possibilities and combinations of known elements (ingredients, words, notes, interesting questions) that nobody has tried before. Be it in the realm of cooking, music, programming, podcasting or literature -- the possibilities are (almost) endless. If I find pleasure consuming that content I have no problem rewarding those that produce it -- and I would never be able to produce such content / will find a way to do so. I am a reasonably good programmer and cook, but a pretty crappy musician -- I would never be able to produce musical content like Amon Tobin, Aphex Twin or Black Sabbath.
But... they can do exactly that. You can whip up a few pages in HTML with pictures and put on Github or shared hosting. Heck, you can even use a publishing platform like WordPress if you're not technically inclined. Each time you use your pot for a family dinner, you jot down the recipe and you publish it. Boom: you've created content!
So, what's the problem then?
It's how the goalpost for defining success have shifted. You're only successful if you are a full time writer of crock pot recipes, and you can leverage your content as a jumping board for wider fame. Which means you spend your days in the kitchen, churning out recipes, you market your content, you strike a branding deal with a crock pot manufacturer, etc. etc. etc.
This is an impossible and unrealistic standard. It's also the standard by which influencers, streamers, Instagram models and so on hold themselves and each other.
The other implied assumption here is that a source on crock pot cooking is only reliable if supported by a professional expert who does just that full time. But if you use this bar to assess quality of content, you risk missing really valuable and great crock pot information out there. Moreover, that expert? Maybe they are paid to push a brand of expensive crock pots; whereas the next hobby cook does the exact same thing in a pot that costs a quarter of the price.
"Oh! But creative creators ought to be paid for their hard work!"
Tough luck. This was a challenge long before the Web was conceived. Few artists, painters, writers, playwrights, sculptors,... were financially independent. Either they were wealthy themselves (nobility,...), or they were lucky to work for wealthy patrons (historically, patronage was a way to display power). Plenty of creators scraped - and are scraping - by with odd jobs. Plenty of now famous writers had other means of income at the start of their careers.
Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, was manager of a Saab dealership, a public relations officer for GE and volunteer fire fighter. Harper Lee was a reservation clerk at Eastern Airlines while she wrote in her spare time, until her friends gave her, aged 30, a note on Christmas 1956: "You have a year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas." They all had pitched in and gifted her a year's wages. That's what allowed her to write To Kill A Mockingbird.
So, when you look at the body of famous artists, and how things worked out for them, you want to be aware of survivor bias.
Sure, UBI would support many more creative endeavours such as they are. But it's no silver bullet. If anything, there's this prevailing idea that it's somehow easy, and preferable, to make a full time, financially independent living by publishing digital content (text, video,...) on the Web. This is a gross overestimation of what the Web can do for you. It just creates unrealistic expectations and sets people, especially young people, up for disappointment if it doesn't work out.
By no means does that mean one shouldn't be creating content and publishing on the Web. But please do it for the right reasons: because it's something you deeply enjoy doing above all anything else.
