[ReleaseCandidat]

> content creation

I seriously hate the term "content" used for "creative output". It is a terrible, derogatory word, that makes me sad. Content is only there to have something to sell, to fill the blank space around ads, the actual content of the content doesn't matter. That people refer to themselves as "content creators" is a sign that they see the value of their creative output only to make money.

[jl6]

Nobody ever thought to themselves: I sure could go for some content right now.

[bityard]

I can't explain why, but I always cringe a little when I hear someone say that they "consume content."

Maybe its because I can't tell if brings up animalistic connotations (a pack of feral hipsters picking at the remains of an endangered podcast on the Serengeti), or if they are intentionally being elitist ("It would be a waste of time to simply read Chomsky's work, an educated person would make the effort consume it.")

[nemomarx]

I get the opposite vibe - you read literature, you consume content like it's generic slop and the quality isn't that important.

[codetrotter]

Agreed. It’s like fast food, but for your brain.

[smsm42]

With the same long-term health benefits.

[guy234]

Fast food should not be consumed.

[Retric]

Fast food isn’t inherently bad.

What most consumers want doesn’t align with what is healthy to eat. You could get water and a decent salad from chick-fil-a, but when nobody buys the health options they eventually get taken off the menu.

[Sammi]

Except on Fridays.

[Boxxed]

A friend of mine was playing the game Slay the Spire and was loving it -- he said something along the lines of, "It's very well designed, and there's so much content!" That always kind of skeeved me out. I think because there's this odd self-awareness of it all?

[bunderbunder]

Ha. This is is exactly what turns me off of Slay the Spire. It's a filler game, full of filler content, designed to fill your time. And not, as far as I can tell, much more than that.

"Content" is a commodity. I don't see a huge difference between the folks who view creative work as "content" and talk about it as if it's fungible and can be valued per uni of weight, and art speculators who buy up works of art they've never seen and then leave it warehoused in some freehold somewhere.

I can't really blame people who do creative work for catering to folks who think about their work this way - everybody's got to eat - but I'll still gladly bemoan the pervasive cultural debasement.

[JohnMakin]

Couldn’t really disagree more, although I guess I see where you’re coming from. Slay the Spire to me lacks “content” at least the way you’re using it - there are 4 classes that essentially have never changed and the levels are pseudo randomly generated and otherwise don’t change much run to run.

However, attaining very high levels in that game requires a depth of skill, strategy, and math that is constantly startling to me, and I used to play card games professionally.

[Forgeties79]

I don’t even like deck builders and STS hooked me for solid 30hrs

[insane_dreamer]

This is exactly why my 12 yr old by likes Genshin Impact (a Zelda type game on the phone): "it always got these new characters" etc. Like infinite scrolling, it's an endless loop to get more gems so you can level up so you can get more new characters as they come up so you can get more gems so you can level up ad infinitum. It's basically like an advanced candy crush that you can just zone out and mindlessly do forever. I hate it.

[7speter]

I think your comment kinda provides the reason why the term “content” is used; there are so many verticals out there that its just easiest to say “I’m a content creator.” From there, if the audience remains captive, you can explain that you make videos about sewing sweaters with embedded controllers for cats.

Also, don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty conflicted on the term. I just like to believe people are using it in good faith when they describe themselves, and don’t just see “content” as a means towards an end.

[jl6]

It makes perfect sense to use the word content where it’s a convenient abstraction. But humans don’t watch/read/play or fall in love with abstractions. The specifics matter.

[immibis]

Not to the investor.

[shiroiushi]

I really hate the use of the word "consume" much more than the word "content" in this context.

[ForHackernews]

You are not a gadget. Your life is not a vertical.

[red1reaper]

Sometimes I wish I was a gadget, then my life would be soo much easier.

[7speter]

Where did I say anyone is a vertical?

[sivers]

I know my up-vote of this comment is supposed to be enough, but I just have to add, as an extra praise @jl6 here:

That's the funniest sentence I've heard in a long time.

“Nobody ever thought to themselves: I sure could go for some content right now.”

Love it love it love it.

[stavros]

Agreed, that sentence really satisfied my appetite for content.

[mindcrime]

This entire thread is some of the best content I've consumed in a while!

[jodrellblank]

Loads of people think "it's film night" or "I want to watch a film" and then "what shall I watch?"

The same with music: "I'll put some music on ... what should I put on?"

And with food: "I want to eat something, what shall I eat?"

People turn the radio on while driving, or the TV on in the background, for 'company' without caring what's on it.

People pick up something - anything - to read while on the toilet, not caring if it's literature, magazine, or the ingredients of the shampoo bottle.

The desirable feature is entertainment, distraction, novelty, escapism, sound instead of silence, activity instead of rigor mortis, ideas instead of void, life instead of death. Not just actionable facts to be studied.

People think that, just not in those words.

[wormius]

I remember in the 90s "content is king" was a catchphrase, this was before the modern internet. Though I had no idea it was a Bill Gates phrase, found this while looking for more info on it (since it's been ages since I've thought that way, after the post 2007/2011-ish shift of the internet).

https://medium.com/@HeathEvans/content-is-king-essay-by-bill...

[AlienRobot]

They didn't use to, but now they do.

[wisemang]

Heh, my brother-in-law have described “content” as being the “love language” of our boomer dads.. the sharing of material (surprisingly often on TikTok these days) that none of us really care about yet continually gets sent out to us. Seemingly the favoured way to keep in touch.

[_DeadFred_]

Not a boomer but honestly every year that passes I can tell my cognitive decline by how much harder it is to not send these things to my kids.

I have a folder full of them marked 'inheritance' so that I can be assured my kids will find it when they scour my computer after I'm dead. They are going to be so stoked!

[codetrotter]

Have you considered opening a high interest account for the inheritance?

Inflation is a sad fact of life.

A funny picture that would get a heartfelt laugh out of most anyone this year, could be eliciting as little as a sensible chuckle 30 years from now!

That’s why it’s important to not just shove all your memes onto some USB drive and sticking it in the mattress. Think wisely, let the Meme Bank be the custodian of all your funny pictures and videos.

Just by looking at a period of 10 years back compared to now, we can see a stark difference between the meme collections that families kept at home vs the meme collections of families that kept their memes in Meme Bank.

There are two factors that contribute by an outsized amount to the lowering of value of the meme collections of average Joe over the years:

Firstly, resolution and compression artifacts. Where ten years ago a 640 by 480 pixels jpeg would have garnered applause from the people you showed it to, the people of today expect more. And all you’d be getting today for that once glorious meme, would be responses asking you “y’all got any more of them pixels?”

Secondly, stale pop-cultural reference. That meme you’ve got referencing a scene from a movie from last year. Yeah, it might still be funny today. In thirty years, usually not so much.

Here at Meme Bank, we take care of these things and that’s how we’re able to keep your meme collection as funny as ever.

“But…”, I hear you say, “these memes hold sentimental value to me, and they are reflective of my kind of humor and of my personality.”

Believe you me when I say, we know that and we respect that. That is why our Meme Experts here at Meme Bank work tightly with our customers to ensure that your meme collections remain true to your individuality.

So don’t hesitate, call us today at 555-MEME. That’s 555-MEME.

[Dansvidania]

As someone that is on the receiving end of such a content feed, I thank you for your attempt not to send things.

[HappMacDonald]

The challenge is that every fruit must have its seed. (Even seedless varieties are artificially created by labs which then themselves can be viewed as the seeds, but I digress..) Nothing of value to others is truly created in a vacuum. It must have some system of re-uptake, of value being conferred back to the creator or else it will never repeat. Ads are one potential way that can be accomplished, but as much as we hate ads we can't just expect them to go away and leave the "content" alone. We have to replace them with some other superior way of remunerating the creators. I wish flattr would have took off as a service, that sort of low-friction idea seemed quite promising.

[insane_dreamer]

> That people refer to themselves as "content creators" is a sign that they see the value of their creative output only to make money

and it is that way.

the worse thing is that you have a younger generation thinking that it's the future of work or something. "Why do I need to do well in school when I'm going to make cute TikTok videos and people are going to pay me lots of money" (almost verbatim words from a 12 year old boy)

[maxvt]

We got a great new word for it now: "slop" (as in, "AI-generated slop").

It can be human generated as well, and the key point is exactly as you wrote it -- it only exists to sell ads around it and has minimal or even negative (wrong or outdated information, poor reasoning, etc.) nutritional value.

[8bitsrule]

So, it's a lot like newstand (or grocery aisle) popular magazines did back then, back in the Elvis days.

[alwayslikethis]

Related: https://pauljun.me/the-four-dirty-c-words-of-the-internet

[hengheng]

Content describes a place in media in a formal way, by saying where it goes and what its role is. This way to categorize "content" makes it a form.

It's similar to how Content Management Systems used to manage the layout and navigation of a website, but never managed the content. They accessed the content that came out of the database, but surely there had to be an author to manage the content. The CMS did everything but.

[rambambram]

This museum definitely has some nice content, even better than the content at the library!

I think the use of the word 'content' stems from the times when all this technological innovation had more emphasis on programming and design and people were busy to find ideas/applications for all the newfound possibilities. Content was an afterthought.

I remember being busy with building a website - around 1998 or so - and only afterwards asking myself what I should use it for. I already got my high from finishing the programming/coding, now I had to fill it up with content.

Some years later, throw some marketeers and MBA type people in the mix, mix it with SEO and ads, and a legitimate need for 'content' arises. Doesn't matter what content, just content. Google is going to decide whether it's good content ('good' of course meaning 'monetizable').

[jeremyjh]

Content is absolutely the best word for most of the shit they are shoveling. I would never use this term to describe a musician or author though I admit it isn't possible to objectively prove the difference and I wouldn't be surprised if younger people can't tell at all.

[kiba]

I don't use the word "content" that way. What you call "content" I call internet slops.

[guy234]

Perhaps an indication of its superficiality is the awkwardness of describing something as "content about" a topic. Its more like a binary, on/off, in that way similar to a lightbulb.

[hbarka]

What term would you prefer?

[doctorwho42]

Welcome to the hyper capitalist world that has been created over the past 60 years. This is the result of always needed growth in your economic system.

[golergka]

Economic growth is another way of saying "improving people's lives". An economic system which always needs to improve people's lives is a good thing, actually.

When you compare modern first world to 60 years ago, people's lives have significantly improved. And if you do the same in developed countries, the difference is unbelievable.

[_DeadFred_]

Problem is the 10-20 year window doesn't look so good.

Only vampires don't realize you can't suck every last drop out out. Every good manager knows you can't count on more than 80% employee utilization in the best circumstances with the best people. Now companies expect zero hour employees (part time employees who are guaranteed zero hours/zero schedule but expected to move their lives around their job, which is one of three part time jobs they need to survive) to do more than that by requiring employees do the manager's job of finding shift coverage off hours using their personal phone, etc while also being 100% utilized during work hours, with zero overlapping roll coverage. That isn't sustainable and no way live, and is an unreasonable expectation from a zero hour job.

[golergka]

It seems to me that you're equating economic growth with "sucking every last drop out". Please correct me if I misunderstood you, but it is a completely nonsensical proposition.

[insane_dreamer]

> When you compare modern first world to 60 years ago, people's lives have significantly improved.

I disagree that most people's lives have "significantly improved" compared with the 1960s. We have more things, but I don't think that our lives are that much better, or even better at all. In the 1950s and 60s most families could get by with a one income household -- try that today.

Even medically - on the one hand our physical health has improved through advances in medicine and life expectancy has increased considerably (mostly due to vaccines). On the other hand we have a huge increase in mental health problems. Per-capita suicide rates in the US are higher today than they were in the 1960s.

(If you're in the top 10% then yes your life has "significantly improved". If you're in the bottom 50% then probably not.)

[shiroiushi]

>I disagree that most people's lives have "significantly improved" compared with the 1960s.

Obviously, you're only looking inside the US. People's lives in the US haven't improved by that much because the US has been squandering its advantages for the last several decades. Outside the US, especially in developing nations, people's lives are far, far better than their parents' and grandparents'.

>In the 1950s and 60s most families could get by with a one income household

Only in the US, because of its post-war economic boom. In most other places, everyone had to work.

[insane_dreamer]

Yes, all fair points. I was of course referring to the US.

But comparing Europe today with the 60s isn't a fair comparison considering the entire continent was devastated -- physically and economically -- during WW2 and it was a long road to rebuilding. Same with Japan.

> especially in developing nations

That much I agree with, but the original post was talking about developed countries (US/Europe/Japan primarily)

[SamPatt]

>I disagree that most people's lives have "significantly improved" compared with the 1960s. We have more things, but I don't think that our lives are that much better, or even better at all. In the 1950s and 60s most families could get by with a one income household -- try that today.

This impression is contradicted by a mountain of data. Ourworldindata.org is a good place to start.

Anecdotally, when I talk to elderly people, they nearly all agree that they've witnessed substantial improvements in living standards. They're not always keen on the cultural changes, but they nearly always view modern living as "better off."

[mellavora]

The promise of capitalism is to improve people's circumstances and thus make them happy.

The promise of buddhism is to make people happy regardless of circumstances.

[golergka]

And the promise of communism is to make everyone equally miserable. I was born in USSR and still remember 5-hour queues for rotting cabbage, thanks.

[red1reaper]

The promise of communism is that the worker owns the means of production, the worker, not the goverment. If the goverment owns your means of production, it's just a corpo disguissed as a country.

[anthonypasq]

this seems like a complete non-sequitur to me

[giardini]

But now you've added a sequitur!

(It's OK to leave a thread dangling in the wind.)

[alexyz12]

seems very relevant to me. Isn't it capitalism that reduces our value to $s? And thus our art is only valuable as content?

[shafoshaf]

I think this is a common misconception of the comparison between "capitalism" and other forms of economic distribution. It's not capitalism that equates everything to dollars, it is how the universe works. This was the beauty of Karl Marx's thinking. He postulated that the best way to measure value is in the amount of human labor that goes into the output. However, once you have a medium to equate the value of a new chair into labor then I can come up with an another transformation to equate that labor into some defined quantity of glass beads. It turns out that choosing Labor as the "value" is completely arbitrary, and so dollars (or yen or gold) works just as well as a medium for conversion.

[MassPikeMike]

Choosing labor as the value is worse than arbitrary, because labor is far less fungible than (say) commodities. The value of labor depends on whose labor it is for the job. Half an hour's labor by one person can turn apples, flour, butter, and sugar into a delicious pie; half an hour's labor by a different person will create a soggy mess. In one case, labor adds value; in another case, it destroys value (can't use that flour for anything else now.)

[funcDropShadow]

> This was the beauty of Karl Marx's thinking. He postulated that the best way to measure value is in the amount of human labor that goes into the output.

This is indeed the most beautiful insight of Karl Marx that I ever read. This predicts perfectly why all socialist/communist economies collapse. They value inefficiency. The more work is needed to build a product, the more valuable it is --- according to Marx. That is one of the most fundamental error in his theories.

[rakoo]

You're assuming socialist/communist economies must, for some reason, be run exactly the same as capitalist economies. Of course if you're trying to mix both it will collapse.

The point of Marx isn't that we should create markets where the value is decided by the amount of labor. The point of Marx is that if Labor creates value, then Labor should be in charge. The problem being that Labor is hard, so the end goal cannot be to maximize Labor (or value), contrary to your implied way of thinking were the most value must be created.

[cloverich]

Can you elaborate on your selection of 60 for the inception point?

[8bitsrule]

That's about the time teen magazines emerged, isn't it. And the subsequent explosion of trends and rumors mags.

[daedrdev]

Somehow the increased accessibility of being an independent entertainer instead of having to work in a toxic entertainment industry that regularly covered up widespread abuse means that capitalism bad.

[ALittleLight]

This seems unnecessarily negative and pessimistic. "Content" is the stuff or substance that people want to consume as opposed to all the associated stuff (branding, SEO, "hooks", whatever). "Content creator" recognizes that there is similarity between long form video essays and shorts and blogs and live streams - and that people who do one often do others.

[DowagerDave]

I don't agree. The emphasis on content implies it's the output that is most important, and that you can split it out from all the nonsense you differentiate above. Many of the people in this thread counter that the act of creation is the most important part. Just stop with "Creator" (or builder or writer).