I heard someone talking about a content creator they watch, and how that creator basically can't take a vacation without losing tons of followers and potentially a major chunk of their income.

effluencers

It perfectly describes their contribution to this reality. Thank you.

Nah, if you are feeding the Zuck, not my team. The principled creatives aren’t there.

It sucks to try to make a living as a creative. But giving your efforts to support social media platforms controlled by the worst people is inexcusable. Zuck literally and provably helped the fascists gain power.

The creatives I can respect create because they are compelled to. They work jobs and create when they can. They share their work on less shitty platforms and in actual real life.

This whole article is nothing but "waaaaaahhhhhh".

They should shut up and just enjoy doing something they're having an easier time doing, than grinding your average 9-5 job. Do they really think they're the only people on the planet?

Facebook isn't the only site these people use...

Zuck owns more than Facebook, too. ANY big social media platform is similarly toxic.

These people have co-opted our social discourse for evil causes. And they aren’t the only way to share work online.

Creative people do not have a right to my admiration if they provide fresh bait that the oligarchs use to degrade democracy and civil society

Yes, they do. Sitting alone in a room, creating video content creates a self-centered and narcissistic worldview. It doesn’t matter how many followers you have you are not really interacting with a single one of them. Get out of your house and meet people in your neighborhood, share your work with them then I’ll be impressed

Curious who signs your paychecks?

I'm hoping it catches on. Spread it around.

The question isn't about admiration, it's about considering them worthy of being respected as fellow human beings who are also struggling. You're just shitting on them because the way they make their living is more directly linkable to sources you don't like.

Every job is going to be that way, one way or another. Even many charities will have shady ties somewhere, that most of the volunteers and employees don't know shit about. Shitting on these people because you don't respect the things they're linked to, and ultimately have no control over, is petty and meaningless. It devalues them as humans, and as much as I'm sure you don't think so, they're still human. And deserve to be treated as such.

If they're like the Pauls or something, I can see criticizing them for being shitty people... but that's not what you're doing, you're shitting on them for being part of a system that exists whether they make use of it or not. And will continue to exist whether they use it or not.

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.

I hear this all the time but I struggle to see how it is true. How many people regularly trawl through their feed looking for creators who haven’t posted in X days and unfollowing them? It would be a minuscule number. I’m pretty darn selective with my follows and I think I’d do this once a year, tops.

I think creators are conflating the everyday ups and downs of follower counts on their platform(s) as being something more. And I think the platforms themselves are encouraging this mentality because they need fresh content.

in the early days of the internet, I'm talking GeoCities days, I started what would be called a podcast about gaming. I recorded with windows sound recorder and a shitty Logitech desktop mic and then ran it through RealAudio to compress it to a downloadable format.

I shared it with communities online like IRC and BBS's.

I got shit on so fucking much that I quit after my 6th cast. I received so much hate that I honestly thought of self harm.

now, it wasn't right that it happened. but, it happened decades ago before podcasting, live streaming, YouTube, content creators, and influencers were a "thing". my point is, it is a danger of creating anything for the world. if you don't have the skin for it, the world will eat you alive, so get over it.

A lot of creators will have a number of videos created ahead of time, so they can go on holiday and still have a steady release schedule.

Does social media create a physical product? Remember, computers need engineers to repair them and electricians to keep the power on. Physical infrastructure.

May I ask what your age range is, and what you do for a living, as well as how much income you make?

By that metric do authors or poets or actors create a physical product? Do computer programers? Since the death of physical media, books and art are now far more frequently digital than paper or canvas. Applications and software is 100% digital. Newspapers are dead, so journalists don't create a physical product. Is your argument that only physical labor producing physical things is "real" work?

yeah I'm pretty shocked that a socialist website would value labor over entertainment like that

I dont give a fuck about their burnout lol. if they love it so much why are they whining about doing it?

I'm in health care, you think illness has a pause button? I chose this, they chose theirs.

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

Just because you do something a certain way doesn't mean everyone does. A huge chunk of these peoples income comes from the random people who find their videos or streams because of the "algorithm". Not from their regular viewers. Those regular viewers allow for a certain amount of steadiness, but they're also more likely to watch videos at a later time rather than right when they're uploaded. Which is a significant drop in revenue for each view.