[ceilingcorner]

Perhaps there wouldn't be so many "content creators" if tech/the Internet hadn't destroyed their livelihoods over the past 20+ years. Authors, journalists, photographers, the list goes on and on.

"I wish people just made content for free" comments always seem to come from people with comfortable, secure incomes and careers.

[vermilingua]

That may perhaps be because some of the best content also comes from people with comfortable, secure incomes and careers.

When people create content they are passionate about for a living, they a) often quickly lose that passion, and b) are more willing to compromise on the quality of their content in order to turn more profit (often through no fault of their own, but as a result of the exploitative nature of most content platforms).

[cedilla]

A lot of brilliant content just requires more time or investment than someone with a day job has. And arguably, creating content alongside a 40 hour job is a compromise on quality itself.

[CaptArmchair]

Plenty of famous writers started out holding odd jobs to make ends meet.

Kurt Vonnegut sold cars, John Grishman worked at a nursery watering bushes, George Orwell was a police officer in Burma, Herman Melville was a cabin boy, T.S. Eliot was a banker, Philip Glass was a plumber and a taxi driver, Richer Serra was a furniture remover, Rothko was an elementary school teacher, Ai WeiWei did street portraits, house painting and carpentry, Keith Haring was a busboy at a night club, the same club where Madonna worked as a coat-check girl, Paul Gauguin was a stockbroker, Jackson Pollock was a babysitter, Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, gas pump attendant and worker at an industrial laundry...

I could go on...

And for every of those names there are plenty of anonymous artists who produced awesome work which never attained the same level of widespread impact on mainstream culture.

As Vonnegut would write: so it goes.

See, digital technology seemingly lowered the bar to reach an audience of millions. It largely has cut out the middle man, the distributor. However, so many young content creators discover now that content doesn't create itself. It still takes time and effort to produce anything worthwhile.

Moreover, artistic or creative freedom is only within reach if you are able to attain financial independence. Or, more succinctly put, someone is willing to pay your living expenses for your privilege to create whatever. Usually that only happens if you find a wealthy philanthropist or patron. And usually, these are people who support budding artists for the sole purpose of showing that their wealth and power is so massive that they can.

Your other option, as creator or artist, is to live as frugally and - hopefully - make smart financial decisions. Like, try and work part time, apply for grants and public funding, try to do work on commission, freelancing,... All in hopes that your work and your name, at long last, gets valued on the market to make a proper living income... which, essentially, is just as much a risky proposition as quitting a job and getting into the start up game.

If you have an artistic vision and you want to execute that vision by pouring in all your time into it, well, you also have to be prepared to face the challenges and consequences that come with that desire. So, you better make sure it's something you genuinely want for yourself.

[ceilingcorner]

I always find it odd that historical arguments are rejected for basically everything - imagine arguing against social security because it didn't exist historically, or for indentured servitude because it did - and yet the exact same line of thought is used against arts and culture, which are ostensibly some of the most important products of a civilization.

Instead, the trope is "well too bad, if you want to be an artist, pay for it yourself." And you wonder why a television reality star is the president of the country...if you don't invest in the arts, what else do you expect to happen?

[CaptArmchair]

And that's a sentiment I can totally get behind.

To be clear, my point wasn't to put the responsibility entirely with the creators. It was about showing that if you reduce the discussion to "How can we get more people to donate/subscribe/like? We need some centralized platform with cutting edge tech to do it!" you're losing out in many ways, and you ignore a massive amount of murky, complex, long standing, socio-economic dynamics.

I tried skirting that last remark myself because it evokes strong emotions and tends to derail any meaningful discussion about this.

On a personal note, I think it's absolutely important that there's public funding for the arts, humanities and non-profit in general. But by the same token, it's fair to state that you can't expect society - a large group of individuals - to support anyone who starts producing and publishing content on social media full time, without question.

[heavenlyblue]

Maybe we should all accept that nobody has to be a journalist (or content creator) and that most of journalism is actually pretty useless trash.

Nobody promised you to “this single mother had been making money from her living room for the past 10 years - click here to learn how to do that, too”

For example, you don’t need a human being dramatising the situation is a third-world country, you just need to learn a few new pieces of news from there. This is why I read newspapers - not for their opinion pieces.

[TheOtherHobbes]

And why does this apply to journalism and not other pretty useless trash like BTC or ad sales or stock price speculation or content marketing or most local and national politics or startups that only sell gourmet pet food?

The irony is that if someone pitched the old newspaper and print magazine model as a startup today - thought leaders, high quality fact-checked journalism, commercial independence but solid relationships with advertisers - it would be branded incredibly exciting and disruptive.

[theamk]

Of course this applies to all those things as well. And we even have very similar threads about other topics -- like "is SEO evil" or "should we adblock"

This post is about journalism though.

[pdpi]

"Trash" journalism pays for the deep investigative stuff, though.

[cafard]

Advertisement have always paid for most of journalism. If the equivalent of classified ads magically vanished from the internet, there would be a rebirth of small newspapers, and the big ones would become much healthier.

[pdpi]

Right, but ads only pay for journalism insofar as newspapers sell, and papers only sell insofar as readers are interested in buying.

[moron4hire]

With the number of newspapers closing every year, apparently trash journalism doesn't even pay for itself.