[danielciocirlan]

You “create content” if what you’re after is just money, and “content” is this malleable goo you have to produce and shove it down the algorithm so that it gets “traffic”, another form of goo that gets “funneled” and “converted” into money.

In other words, it loses all (human) meaning.

So yes, if you care at all, you shouldn’t “create content”. You should be writing essays, recording tutorials, training, music, conversations, etc. the kind of things you care about, for an audience whose attention you don’t take for granted, hoping that they too will care at least a little. If they do, they will pay you because they will rather part with money than part with your work.

[tombert]

A long time ago Simon Peyton Jones said Haskell tries to "avoid success at all costs".

He was being cheeky, but it honestly is how I try and approach most of what I do that isn't directly related to my employment (as a software person).

My blog posts are just for me; I don't market them, I don't expect anyone else to read them, I don't spam links to all my friends every time I post anything.

I have no idea if my writing could make any money in any universe, but since it's not my source of income I don't want to be beholden any kind of "monetization incentives".

[nine_k]

In must be noted that it should parse as (avoid (success at all costs)), not (avoid success)(at all costs).

That is, losing integrity for the sake of success is what's to be avoided, not success itself.

[throwaway201606]

I appreciate this clarrification comment: had originally read this as option B and was wondering "why would they say this?"

[sodapopcan]

I always read it as option b as well. I figured it meant they wanted to avoid the "too many cooks" problems that plagues all popular languages, and especially avoid extreme pressure from powerful "clients" to make specific changes. IE, was about control.

But ya, now that I see nine_k's comment, option makes a lot of sense.

[projektfu]

Me too, but I think it means to avoid being constrained by success, like Python 2.

Elm took this a little to far.

[tombert]

I always took it as "make the 'best' decision [1] without regard for whether or not it's going to be popular or make the language more business-friendly".

[1] however you choose to define "best"

[cl4ptr4p]

> Haskell tries to "avoid success at all costs".

I wonder whether one could say the same about Zig these days. The maintainers conspicuously avoid to employ the usual methods for popularizing a new language that others seem to take for granted. Although I'm not (yet?) a user of Zig, I rather enjoy this different approach where quality (in the maintainers' view) outweighs quantity.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Same here.

I also write software for free, but it’s not a cry in the dark. It’s serious, ship-grade software, released into the App Store, and used by thousands.

It’s just not designed to make money.

[inigyou]

I'd seriously suggest charging money for anything in the app store to offset the money it costs to publish in the app store. You can also offer a free version on your own website.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Yeah, but it's a long story. I do it for a very specific reason. I'm retired, and don't need the money. It's enjoyable, and many people benefit.

[ares623]

Software engineers, or at least the well compensated ones, are living proof that some level of UBI is beneficial. Look at all the works we have collectively created just because we don't have to worry about basic needs and actually have enough time and energy left to do the things we care about. Imagine if other professions had such luxury. Teachers in particular I'm very curious about.

I also think that the Cambrian explosion age of FOSS will soon be over, now that well compensated software engineers are a dying breed.

[otabdeveloper4]

FOSS is a legal and political tool that removes catastrophic dependency risk.

It's not something that exists simply because software developers had free time to waste.

[inigyou]

You can have commercial software with source or with reverse engineering rights. You can also just illegally reverse engineer it anyway - only matters if you get caught, and companies will only suffer civil penalties (fines).

FOSS is now mostly sponsored by commercial enterprises. The part that isn't sponsored is dying or has died. Linux was a silly project by one guy, where are projects like that now?

[ghaff]

There are a lot of FOSS projects that aren't sponsored in a major way by corporations: LibreOffice, SQLite, the Linux desktop interfaces, a number of languages... I won't claim that corporations don't support those and others at all. Yes, many are attached to foundations for solid governance reasons. But there are many popular projects that largely exist outside of major corporate backing--especially direct financial support (as opposed to letting some engineers be involved part-time.

[tikhonj]

There are still a lot of smaller totally independent projects like this. I suspect that there are more—far more—just-for-fun projects today than in past decades in absolute terms.

I love Haskell, I've spent a lot of time in the general area around functional programming, types, proofs and PL, and there is still a vibrant community with lots of amazing non-commercial projects there. I'm sure the same is true in other areas of the programming world.

Ditto for the Emacs world. Emacs and its package ecosystem are amazing, better than they've ever been, and ≈entirely driven by non-commercial work.

Same for a big chunk of NixOS, although there's also been some real commercial investment there now.

I never really thought about it before writing this comment, but, except for games, most of the software I use and care about is primarily community-driven rather than commercial. And it's absolutely great.

Despite smaller communities and low monetary investment, a remarkable number of things about Haskell and Emacs and Nix are simply better than any commercial alternative, full stop.

The problem isn't that this kind of software has died—it's thriving more than ever—but just that the rest of the field has grown around it even faster. Programming is so commercially valuable that there has been a ton of investment in it and now we have millions of people for whom it's just a career, and trillions of dollars pouring into companies powered, primarily, by programming. It's a wild time. The overall feel of the field is definitely different now, but you can still find classic hacker enclaves. You just have to cut through the noise first.

[codazoda]

I would argue a large percentage of us are creatives and that might have driven us to software engineering. That’s the case for me, at least. I love many other creative things but selected software for my job.

[flir]

Commonplace book. Mine just happens to be (theoretically) public.

(This takes a lot of pressure off - I publish notes, half-finished thoughts, stuff I'll "get around to later" with no shame).

[tombert]

As a rule, I only write stuff if I feel like I have an opinion or take on something that isn't very common. I've abandoned half-written posts because I realized that I am not saying anything particularly unique or interesting, and I don't really see the point of writing about it.

Granted, being uninteresting has never really stopped me from writing long comments on HN...

[agumonkey]

I guess success can have different meanings, short term trend-chasing success or long-term principled mature success ?

[xboxnolifes]

I agree with everything except the last sentence. Humans are not rational agents, doubly so when it comes to money and spending. There are many communities where charging even a nominal fee for your work leads to backlash due to built up expectations of free contribution.

[figassis]

I'm not sure if they're irrational. Payment/subscription fatigue is a thing. Today it seems like you have to pay to breathe. It's suffocating. I often go through periods where I reject every money ask compulsively, the same way as I would "disconnect".

It's quite interesting how quality of life gets inverted in non intuitive ways. If you travel to a "developing country" you notice you are no longer bombarded with ads. Watching YouTube is close to the premium experience, bc the country presents no ad revenue to Google. You then travel to a "developed" country and you can't watch a 5 minute video without watching 2 ads.

Everything is a transaction, it is too easy to transact. People used to just write, to just make music. Sure, they need to eat, but they lie. You hear people that make insane amouns of money asking for a coffee. imho, writing is a thing you to to share knowledge, to have a conversation, to learn, etc. It is a way to also get people to know you better, and maybe learn about the things you do that they would want to pay for. So unless writing is your full time job, asking money for it leaves a bad taste.

[xboxnolifes]

> I'm not sure if they're irrational. Payment/subscription fatigue is a thing.

Payment fatigue is an irrational thing, at least in the context of what a rational economic agent is. Rationally, you pay for what you value, at roughly what it is valued to you, and you don't pay for you want you don't value. Transactions are fatiguing precisely because we are not rational agents. Humans live primarily on emotion and ingrained behavior, with small bursts of applying logic.

[zamadatix]

It's not the core idea of "fatigue of paying for value" itself but something more akin to "fatigue of keeping track of which things were actually worth paying for, which starts to take more value than you can create with the same amount of time or could get with a few well thought out larger payments". It's usually brought up around subscriptions precisely because they are a lot of work to track but easy to forget.

[danlitt]

This does not sound like an accurate description of "rational agents". A rational agent may value something less because of a perceived second-order effect (e.g. "If I accept a price hike, there will be more price hikes in the future"). There's nothing non-rational about that.

In general, the "rational agent" abstraction is so flexible it can represent almost any real-world behaviour (which is why it's a bad model, not that humans are fundamentally irrational in some way).

[jiriknesl]

Back in the day, I bought an office software and I owned it. Now, I rent it and over years, it costs me 5* more.

Back in the day, computer games were paid once. Or if you had a pack. Now, it is a series of $1-$2 small sales for thing here and there.

And I could go on. It is tiring. I think payment fatigue is very much a rational thing.

[account42]

What if what I value is that something is not corrupted by monetary incentives?

[card_zero]

If it costs the audience something, they're demonstrating their sincerity. So one problem with giving stuff away for free is that you might doubt how much your fans really mean it. Maybe they're just taking free stuff on principle, maybe they're praising you for the pleasure of giving praise, if they don't put their money where their mouth is. Maybe I don't sincerely care about a lot of the free stuff I say I enjoy, it's hard to tell when there's no test of what it's worth to me.

Then again I suppose there's also an opposite sunk-cost effect where a fan feels obliged to insincerely say how great the thing is, because of being literally invested in it.

[figassis]

idk, taking free stuff on principle is not a thing that's done everywhere. Time is costly. Reading crap content costs me more than the money I'd pay for it.

[gofreddygo]

For the producer, a nominal (at cost) fee is worse than an exorbitant one. better to have a few high paying customers first then drop the price inviting more than the other way around of charging nothing first then going up

[inigyou]

> malleable goo

I see you read https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/

[hotsalad]

What this reminded me of was the fiasco of the McDonald's CEO referring to the Big Arch as a "product". Is it a product? Sure. That is about the least specific word he could have used for it, and it implies that he doesn't care that it is a cheeseburger, but that any type of item produced by any company he happened to lead would have made him equally happy.

It is likely true that he is just there to run a business and feels no sense of pride in its specific offerings, but the accidental honesty was amusing.

[satvikpendem]

No, it's just that it was an accidental leakage of business vernacular, like product managers or when managers in a company talk about a certain product they're working on.

[pj_mukh]

"so that it gets “traffic”, another form of goo that gets “funneled” and “converted” into money."

How is this any different from a small business hot dog stand, setting up outside a game to get more of the "traffic" instead of paying rent somewhere busy. You're a small business trying to get eyeballs, you do what you gotta do and call it what you want, instead of paying for ads like the big boys.

[duggan]

Hot dog stands don't often masquerade as creative expression.

[pj_mukh]

who gets to define what's real creative expression and what's not?

[georgeecollins]

I am so glad someone said this! I get really mad when a PR person writes the word content in the press release for my company. We don't create content.

To me "content" means you don't know what you are making or you are very embarrassed about it. We make art or entertainment that people pay for.

In general there are two axis I think about in media. One axis is originality, the other axis is durability. Very unoriginal is a transcription of information everyone already knows. Investigative reporting that reveals new information is very original. A creative story is original.

Durability is how long the thing will have some value. They can put the Wizard of Oz in Sphere today. A Tik Tok video will probably be forgotten in a day or two. You could call that "quality" but that's harder to define and measure.

Value is created in being as original and durable as possible. Platforms want you to be the opposite-- that's the slop they call content.

[inigyou]

> "content" means you don't know what you are making

This again reminds me of the Telecom New Zealand rebranding. They changed their name from Telecom (meaningful) to Spark (maximally meaningless) and their logo from the word Telecom with a pair of wires passing through the O, to a Claude-esque generic inkblot (maximally meaningless). It gives the impression it got taken over by new management who have no idea what the company actually does, which is probably true.

[inerte]

More likely they don’t care what the company does. Sell cars or muffins, it’s all the same thing you just tweak numbers in a spreadsheet.

[inigyou]

That's fine for the finance department (just like how "content" is fine for backend programmers) but how can any serious business work when the CEO is business-agnostic? Capitalism has fucked up.

[Imustaskforhelp]

> There is a tug of war between people and platform as such across this diagonal axis.

People want value whereas platforms want content, the incentives between a viewer and platform/content creator are getting broken because of the overhead incentive of the platform/content creator for money aka content.

There are some places where its not the case, namely wikipedia (aside from its recent controversies) and archive.org both being non-profit, though there are issues with non-profits as well in terms of their funding and other things. Open source being the example of it in terms of how much value it gives us but there is a lack of funding of that as well.

There has to be some balance in all of it but it seems that the balance is binary-like. Either we are seeing mostly open source underfunded software or we are seeing platforms/content-creators using their power for more money.

It also comes to the point that GP comment makes though, content is created by the expectation of profit and so that is its benchmark but value is created for something more emotional but people also like to eat food and would prefer to do so doing work on open source/the work they like for example but then it also pushes itself into content boundary rather than value.

@tombert has a comment about it which says that they are writing blogs and creating value for the sake of it because they have job on the side and its just the first example that I got reading this thread but many people actually create value as such, but as such they are creating value "in-spite" of incentives and the actual incentives are working on the opposite side of value creation.

It is similar to how actual Musicians in music industry are really exploited by all the systems around them yet they still create Music (value) in-spite of all of it because creating music (value) means more to them than all the issues and there is something human about creating value/music. Here's an extremely good video about it[0]

if money follows content and content follows money, perhaps content is just value which follows money and being shallow rather than something deeper and all these dynamics that interact with each other are leading to a tug of war in the first place.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx7baJMQuVA

[Fotis-Karmpas]

To be honest mass appeal does not mean great content! I launched an online business recently so Iam trying my best to post stuff that gets people's attention. I still get zero views on TikTok after two days.

[butlike]

To that end, I don't like creating that corpus of work _for social media_. As a musician, I don't think it converts to ticket sales. At a certain level it's required to keep a musician's name in the conversation if you're, say, a big EDM artist, but at that level it's nothing more than just a "dumb piece of content" without any of the labor of love you mentioned.

So then where as a musician does the content go on the internet if it doesn't convert? I feel I'd be better off putting up posters outside venues or some of those roller glue posters on boards in the artsy part of town.

[satvikpendem]

This is no different than a job except for some reason people attribute this type of work with "meaning" and not others. Yes, if you want to make money, you must produce something others want. If you want to make something with "meaning" then do so once you're financially rich. Your comment is literally the starving artist stereotype.

[QuantumGood]

At a certain point in the process, a little additional content multiplies the value of your existing efforts. But that is misunderstood (survivor bias?) as "make lots of content, because the successful people did".

[pessimizer]

> If they do, they will pay you because they will rather part with money than part with your work.

Paying for access to "content" that isn't capital is a bizarre business model. The only reason it ever existed is because the medium (paper, videotape) was expensive. The smart reason you pay people is because you want them to continue producing, not because you want to continue consuming.

If I have something to say, it's a favor people are doing for me when they read it. In the real world, you beg for people to listen to you.

Influential people already know this. I don't sponsor people who do journalism or write about politics so I can entertain myself. I don't need them to continually convince me of things I already believe, and any entertainment that I get from the uncovering of corruption is prurient. The reason I send them money is so that other people might come to believe what I believe, and so that other people will see the corruption that I disapprove of.

Most other free "content creation" is in fact people advertising themselves as useful capital, hoping to be acquired by other people who think that they can make a profit. "Content creation" is a cargo cult; if you're lucky, 1) somebody sees you as capital and buys you, or 2) somebody else who shares your ability to profit off a related range of content notices you, and you create a mutually beneficial community.

If you're unlucky, you just do random stuff with no object. Or I should say very lucky, because you're already being subsidized by someone else - the proof is that you're eating and not cooking.

There's always been way too much "content," long before the internet. In fact, the internet is currently in the midst of an orgy of content destruction in order to protect capital, while criminals are the ones attempting to preserve and distribute that content.

[vintermann]

> The smart reason you pay people is because you want them to continue producing, not because you want to continue consuming.

I've said this a long time. I also don't want to be "gilding the lily": if someone makes plenty of money making the "content" I like, I would like to redirect my contribution to marginal work, something nice that almost doesn't get made. There should not be "content" multimillionaires, that's a failure of our collective incentive structures.

[randysalami]

I'm sorry but my first thought after reading:

"You should be writing essays, recording tutorials, training, music, conversations, etc. the kind of things you care about... If they do, they will pay you because they will rather part with money than part with your work"

Is an AI company webcrawler sucking up your novel work, for free, only to goop it out to everyone else without compensating you a dime. And while you worked so hard to genuinely create something, that won't be amplified by internet algorithms so no real human will see it, another person will do a dance or be funny, edgy, unethical, controversial, and get 1000x the human eyeballs, money, and power - probably using AI to write the very words they regurgitate.

It's a sad world after all.

[Ferret7446]

That's a bit too cynical and missing the point. "Content" is what people want. You create what people want.

> You should be writing essays, recording tutorials, training, music, conversations, etc. the kind of things you care about, for an audience whose attention you don’t take for granted, hoping that they too will care at least a little. If they do, they will pay you because they will rather part with money than part with your work.

Yeah, that's called content. "the kind of things you care about, for an audience whose attention you don’t take for granted, hoping that they too will care at least a little" doesn't quite roll off the tongue.

[__rito__]

What you are saying is true. But YouTube/FB algorithms are deliberately skewed towards regular posters.

It's like your content of love that you produce once or twice a month won't be shown to the users at all.

Where do I get the time after job, family, friends and self-study?

So I don't create content like that at all. I write. And that's all.

But I also want to make videos. The recording, editing timeline is way too high. And then if your stuff is not shown to anybody, that's a huge bummer.

[butlike]

I would say creating content isn't important until you reach a critical mass of users (at which point it might help you stay relevant), since I don't think it converts well when you're a smaller creator.

[mc3301]

I follow many creators who only post a handful of times (if that) a year. They get tons of views, because the content is well made.

Stuff Made Here

Bobby Fingers

Boy Boy

Michael Reeves

..to name a few off the top of my head

(Of course, theses are mostly HUGE channels)

[TACIXAT]

The flexibility you bemoan in content creation is the exact same search people perform when running a startup. Finding product-market fit is a search process and content creators do the same thing. They see what customers like and focus in on that. Is it somewhat soulless? For sure. It is not unique to content creation though.

[CodingJeebus]

There are all kinds of people out there generating meaningful content on their own terms that will never get picked up by the algorithm. I hate the content mills as much as anyone else, but the fact is that they exist because internet economy rewards them. The entire ecosystem incentivizes the soulless "goo" you describe over the meaningful work people are doing.

Ice T said it best: "Don't hate the player, hate the game".

[wolvesechoes]

"Don't hate the player, hate the game"

I believe lack of social ostracization is one of the reason we find ourselves in current state. Because players are what perpetuates the game.

[oska]

Yes, I've always disliked this saying. People have agency. They can always refuse to play the game (and that is precisely what many great people chose to do).

[inigyou]

Refusing to play the game just means you lose the game. It isn't a third state, it's a resignation.

[oska]

You can't resign from a position you never held or a game you never entered into

[inigyou]

Oh you're in the game. Your choice is whether to win the game or lose the game. Also if you lose the game you die. It's like Jumanji. Pretending the tiger isn't real is not a viable option.

[inigyou]

Capital is far more powerful than social ostracization. Consider the middle east situation: most of the money is on the opposite side from most of the people. You get kicked out of most groups for advertising that you support the money side. But the money side still won because it paid off everyone important.

[ktallett]

You don't need to do that as an activity. You can earn money doing something more useful.

[TACIXAT]

Entertaining people is useful! In my opinion, it is probably one of the most ethical ways to make money. I think game development is in that category too. It is a very pure field where you are giving a consumer something they enjoy and seek out.

[ktallett]

Ethical all depends on if what you are doing is really you. Whether you are being you. The same way with any creative pursuit. There is a significant difference between creativity for creativities sake and creativity marketed to exploit.

[t0mpr1c3]

Do you mean authentic?