My lord the amount of “I have a REAL job” in here is too damn high. I work 8 hours a night, 40+ hours a week, in an automotive plant. My job can be very stressful, and physically demanding. So what?

I don’t sit here and whine about people that stare at their screens (IT, developers, etc) all day. Are they really doing any work? After all, they are not performing physical labor.

How is it that different for people who create content? I’d argue that they do more work, as they have to set up, film, edit and market their work.

See how silly this sounds? A job is a job. Unless you own your own business, you are making money for someone else.

As OP specified in another reply, they were talking about streamers specifically. And with them, big chunk of the income comes from Twitch subscribers, which is a monthly paid subscription. If you are willing to pay someone for it, you'll notice pretty much immediately if they miss their scheduled stream and cancel it.

For many other platforms what you said is true, I'm way more likely to unsubscribe from someone when they post a video and remind me I'm still subbed than when they take a break and fade out of my feed.

Children were never eating tide pods either

Yes they were. Because some people really are that dumb.

The same year, nearly 220 teens were reportedly exposed, and about 25 percent of those cases were intentional, according to data from the American Association of Poison Control Centers.

So far in 2018, there have been 37 reported cases among teenagers — half of them intentional, according to the data.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/01/13/teens-are-daring-each-other-to-eat-tide-pods-we-dont-need-to-tell-you-thats-a-bad-idea/

And that's just reported numbers for teenagers. I can almost guarantee you the number of idiots that ate one and didn't know how to call poison control is much higher.

At least in some cases, it might just be wholesome advice. The fact that you have "a job" and a whole different persona from that and they're two separate things that sometimes intertwine probably brings you closer to us in administrative tasks (in the end, IT is by definition always something administrative rather than actually productive) than me as in an IT guy with an influencer. Because ultimately, your actual identity is your job, and by conclusion, your whole life is performative, which sounds REALLY exhausting

How does one unintentionally eat a tide pod? So you tell the guy when you're checking in at the ER "Homie and I were just playing catch with a tide pod and I was yelling at cousin Mabel to get off the dang roof and it just dropped into my mouth and I swallowed. It was a one in a million shot doc. One in a million."

More likely they did it intentionally and didn't want to admit to it to avoid embarrassment. That or one of their dumb buddies thought it'd be funny based on some Tiktok they saw so they dropped one into someone's bowl of Doritos.

Either way all I was doing was correcting a false statement you made about children never eating tide pods. Because they surely did.

Out of tens of millions of children, that's nothing. It was pure fear mongering

It's both fear mongering and a problem. I imagine there are a lot more unreported cases, since teens are especially unlikely to ask for help with something like this. On the other hand, it was used as an excuse to attack TikTok, which is stupid because the similar things happen on other platforms and happened before everyone was on social media. Kids will do stupid things as long as peer pressure is a thing.

You aren't wrong. But being a social media influencer is something almost no one would accidentally fall into. People who do it intentionally are doing it to chase a dream of fame and fortune and glamor - but because there is a limited amount of attention in the world and it is highly concentrated, you are really rolling the dice on a dream if you decide to commit to it. There is a very high probability that even if you put your whole heart and soul into it and did everything perfectly, you will still never achieve much more financial success than a child's lemonade stand.

It's basically the same thing as wanting to be a blockbuster film actor or a rock star or an NBA player. If you are struggling and unsuccessful... Well yeah, that's exactly what everyone told you would happen. Go get a different job. And if you are successful and famous and making tons of money - "oh no, boohoo, it must be so hard to be successful beyond your wildest dreams."

It's easy to try on that pair of shoes. Those ignorants should go ahead and try building a community, try creating a video with some genuine effort regarding its content and - especially - edit it in an appealing way.

Heck, I was doing some Blender rendering for fun as a hobby and am occasionally recording some demo videos of a project I am working at for my supervisor. Sometimes it takes about two hours to edit a fucking 10 minute video. This is just a huge amount of work. No wonder any creator, who has reached a sufficient level of income, hires editors.

here, take a pie from the shelf

Yep, this exactly. They can never clock out at the end of the day. It isn’t 8 hours of work and you’re done. You’re having to constantly try to innovate. Make tons of content, spend so much time editing, constant filming, constant planning. And if you deviate in your schedule, or upload some content that isn’t interesting, the algorithm punishes you and you may even get people that unsubscribe.

Must be hell when you can’t afford to take a vacation from that content creator life. Can never really “switch off”. Plus the fact that less than 1% actually make it big, and it’s mostly based on luck plus years and years of determination.

Doesn't help if you're a streamer, though. I guess that was a part I left out, whoops -_-

in the end, IT is by definition always something administrative rather than actually productive

Lol, what?

Might as well say mechanics are administrative too

Your TikTok addiction may have turned you into a psychopath. "Kids die all the time, what's the big deal?"

The gun rights crowd has better arguments about why their hobby is more important than kids dying.

You get this a joke?

Children were never eating tide pods either.

Just go hide back under your rock. Next thing you'll say is that kids are absolutely safe minded individuals that stop and think about their safety and the safety of others when see they something that intrigues them.

You get this a joke?

Children were never eating tide pods either.

Bro - I was literally a fucking teacher during the peak of that moral panic. I spend more time every day with teenagers than half of you on this thread do. Every kid knew it was a fucking joke. A handful of children actually did it on purpose, and like every moral outrage/hysteria it became “teens are doing this wild crazy thing!”

Yes, teenagers do dumb fucking shit all of the time. It’s not the shit the media picks up on for the viral clicks.

The real shit teens are actually doing is vaping shady carts and creating massive group chats to bully each other with naked pictures. But that doesn’t sell the same kinds of ad impressions as “there’s a stupid TikTok video that when viral so we are going to assume this is a massive regular thing that hundreds of children are doing.” Talking about those issues involves parents having to, you know, parent but instead it’s gotta be about stupid shit.

The real “hiding under a rock” is being distracted by the newest stupid TikTok video instead of dealing with the things teenagers actually do.

With administrative, I meant that IT is a about information flow - defining rules how data is consumed, transformed and ultimately output. These by definition of a classic business I'd see as administrative.

I agree the wording isn't good, and I didn't mean it as in "anyone working in IT is just performing administrative tasks", but rather that the field of IT is traditionally more of an enabler of other businesses.

The mechanic is usually the actual worker - you run a repair shop - but his spare parts management is an administrative task, and nowadays usually implemented by an IT solution.

The mechanic is usually the actual worker - you run a repair shop

But what is being repaired? A machine of some kind? And the machine is operated in pursuit of another actual productive activity, right?

Machines are just about the application of mechanical force in some way, and that in itself isn't an end goal. Instead, we want that machine to move stuff from one place to another, to separate things that are apart or smush/mix separate things together, to apply heat or cooling to stuff, to transmit radiation or light in particular patterns.

Everything in the economy is just enabling other parts of the economy (including the informal parts of the economy). Physical movement of objects isn't special, compared to anything else: kicking a ball on TV, singing into a microphone, authorizing a wire transfer, entering a purchase order, answering a phone, etc.

I'm not seeing a real distinction between an IT consulting business and a heavy equipment maintenance/repair business. The business itself is there to provide services to other businesses.