[zarro]

Whenever 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]

The 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]

Power 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]

generally 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

[zarro]

Power 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.