
YouTube Created a Generation of Young Stars. Now They Are Getting Burned Out - JumpCrisscross
https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-created-a-generation-of-young-stars-now-they-are-getting-burned-out-11576762704
======
pjc50
It sounds like we've combined the intermittent reinforcement dopamine machine
with financial insecurity and created a monster.

> PewDiePie, who was the first individual creator to hit 100 million
> subscribers, said in a video that he was taking a break

On the one hand, it's amazing that one person can produce a show which reaches
what previously you'd have needed a multinational TV organisation for. On the
other hand, doing it alone makes it a lonely business with a higher risk of
drifting off in a bad direction with nobody to correct you.

> YouTubers say they are afraid to take time off, out of fear it will hurt how
> their videos are highlighted on the site, which uses an algorithm to
> determine which ones to recommend. While the algorithm is a mystery

This is why so much of the "is youtube good or bad" question is misled by
looking inside the videos. The really important action of youtube, the thing
which prevents people leaving it, is (a) the recommendation and (b) the
funding .. both of which are completely opaque to those whose careers depend
on them. They're left with chaining themselves to a video camera to appease
their machine god.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
What I quite frankly struggle to understand is why this deal seems to be a
good proposition for people. Your odds of becoming the next PewDiePie are
Powerball odds, essentially. The work offers no security, no benefits, and
very lumpy income. You say one wrong thing, and you get cancel cultured (some
cases, it's justified. But is it always?). My point: Why would you pick this
up as a primary source of income? It's a terrible deal, yet so many people
choose it. Maybe I'm really privileged in being able to walk away from bad
deals. I wouldn't take a new job for less pay.

~~~
munificent
No one who gets into this is thinking of it as a "deal". There's no single
point of transaction where they do the entire cost/benefit analysis. What
happens is more like:

1\. They record a video of something on their phones and upload it to share
with their friends. Practically every human with a smartphone does this at
some point.

2\. Maybe they enjoyed that and the feedback they got from their friends, so
they make it public and maybe upload a few more. They start thinking about
sharing videos to an audience bigger than the people they personally know.
This is a completely natural transition because most people on Earth are
frequently watching YouTube videos that were shared just like that.

3\. Now it starts to feel like the video itself is the goal and not the
experience they were having that they happened to film. Instead of "we were
doing X and recorded it" it's "I'm making a video of X". They make more little
videos and upload them. They enjoy seeing their production skills improve, and
it feels good to make things. Their friends think they're funny and it feels
really nice getting a positive comment or thumbs up on the video. They are
getting zero money. It's entirely about intrinsic reward.

4\. Some small fraction of the people who reach 3 stick with it enough and
have the right personality/video skills/topic/whatever to get a bit of
traction. Now they're making a tiny amount of money and being a "YouTuber"
starts to feel like more of who they are. They start to wonder how far they
can take this.

5\. Now that some trickle of money is coming it, they naturally start thinking
about _investing_ in what they do. It makes sense to maybe get a better
camera, or buy Final Cut Pro. They start putting real time into this, at the
expense of other hobbies and activities.

6\. At this point, being a YouTuber starts to involve actual _trade-offs_.
They're putting enough time and money into it that they are sacrificing other
opportunities. Raising their production value and keeping up with posting
frequency means they need to make videos even when they don't feel like it.
They start doing the calculation of whether it's worth it.

7\. Those who decide it is worth it now need to start taking it more
seriously. The sacrifices they are making are clear and fixed, but the rewards
(popularity and money) are less predictable. Now they are at the point you
mention where they start really caring about optimizing for YouTube's opaque
algorithm. Those who do it well may actually be able to make a living, but it
always feels tenuous and uncertain. Staking your income on the combination of
popularity contest/machine learning algorithm/ad platform is pretty sketchy.
But for some it actually works. And, at this point, you're in pretty far,
already have a lot of experience and time put in, so it makes sense to see how
far you can ride it.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
#7 seems to have hints of sunk cost fallacy, but #1-6 really explain how this
organically happens for people. They don't go into expecting the outcome to be
#7, which would explain the fallacies I was making. Thanks!

~~~
munificent
I think people tend to over-correct when discovering the sunk cost fallacy. It
is definitely a fallacy people fall for, pretty frequently. But there are also
things that look like sunk cost fallacies that are actually trying to extract
value from previous investments.

In the case of YouTubers, if you already have thousands of followers, video
gear, lighting, hard-earned performance skills, and video editing proficiency,
then it is entirely rational to try to continue to leverage those investments
for your future income.

I've got two decades of experience in software engineering. It's not a sunk
cost fallacy for me to continue looking for software engineering jobs, it's me
trying to capitalize on that investment.

The _real_ hard part is figuring out when some past investment like that is
winding down such that you're better off discarding your potential future
earning from it order to spend that time building up a new investment. You
don't wait until the copper mine is _completely_ empty to shut it down. You
close it when the copper you can extract is worth less than you could get from
spending that time elsewhere. Making that calculation for our intangible skill
investments is really difficult.

------
exdsq
PewDiePie made a video the other day where he called these articles out as
grossly misrepresenting what he said (he was going to take a break because he
has uploaded a video every day since he can remember, including having a
shorter honeymoon to accommodate it).

This isn't burning out, it's having a holiday.

~~~
dgellow
The video, from 2 days ago:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoFSqtrivFs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoFSqtrivFs)

------
coffeefirst
I was an indie filmmaker. (It’s a hobby, we knew there was no money in it.) It
was pretty clear to us that the YouTube algorithm was all about high volume,
low quality. The kind of ambitious projects that were all about writing and
acting we could spend a year creating would never find a home our audience
there.

This has two consequences:

1\. It sucks to be a producer for the platform.

2\. The audience is pushed towards endless junk content instead of quality
because that’s what the algorithm favors and incentivized producers to put
into the world.

It did not have to be this way. It still doesn’t. The algorithm is an
intentional decision to favor one style of content and production over others.

~~~
umvi
Somehow Mark Rober does pretty well only making 12 videos a year. The YouTube
algorithm recommends his videos almost instantly upon release.

~~~
kawfey
These and the aforementioned YouTubers have their videos accelerated to the
top after 10 or more years of consistency in quality, non-controversy, and
positive audience engagement. The Algorithm knows any video produced by those
creators is going to be of high quality, high information, and have positive
response from millions of people, so it behooves YouTube to push those videos
to the top.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
I don't think that's true. Oversimplified for example has only been around for
like 3 years.

It's certainly true that "people will like this" is a factor in the
recommendations, but that seems... correct? It would be pretty silly if
Youtube kept pushing indie films people don't want to watch at them.

------
jsonne
Generally speaking, "the algorithm being a mystery" seems to be causing a lot
of societal ills. What news we see on Facebook, what sources we see on Google,
what pressure content creators feel. All of it causes a lot of anxiety and
really only profits a small handful of companies by allowing them to dodge
moderation duties. Moving companies that rely on UGC closer to a publisher
probably is a good thing for the world (and content creators).

~~~
eloff
Serious question, are we at the point where some algorithms are so important
in our society that they should be a public good?

Should the government require that Google search, Facebook and YouTube
recommendation algorithms be published? And should changes to those algorithms
need to meet certain criteria at by regulators, in order to prevent ill
effects on society?

I'm thinking there must come a time when our machine algorithms are so
impactful in society that we can't afford to leave them in the stewardship of
a single private company with only profit motives. I think we probably reached
this point a while ago.

~~~
jasode
_> Should the government require that Google search, Facebook and YouTube
recommendation algorithms be published? _

Many folks often wish that ranking/recommendation algorithms like PageRank
search engine, or Youtube "watch next", or email spam heuristics, etc, be
revealed to the public. E.g. the exact algorithm is required by law to be
published on Github.

That would hurt society more than help because once the algorithms are public,
the code's inner workings can then be _gamed and abused_.

That's the paradox or contradiction: for the algorithms to be _effective_ ,
they have to be kept a secret to prevent gaming.

Recommendation/ranking algorithms are not to be confused with "security by
obscurity" memes. Yes, you can publish the exact algorithm to derive a SHA-256
but that's not the same domain as a ranking algorithm. For Google to
transition the algorithms from basic PageRank to Panda to Penguin to
Hummingbird, etc ... the inner workings must be kept secret to be effective.

I know it drives people crazy that the algorithms are secret but you can't
make them public in a way that stops abusers from using that knowledge against
us.

~~~
jsonne
"That would hurt society more than help because once the algorithms are
public, the code's inner workings can then be gamed and abused."

This happens without it being public knowledge and is commonly referred to as
SEO. Keeping the black box a block box hurts more than helps because the
privileged few that do have it figured out completely control the narrative.
In addition a publicly published algo helps re-introduce competition. I see it
as no different than food products being required to list ingredients.

~~~
jasode
_> This happens without it being public knowledge and is commonly referred to
as SEO._

I'm not claiming that absolutely zero gaming is possible. For all the
successes that the SEO industry achieves, it's still a version of the
proverbial blind men (SEO experts) feeling different parts of a giant elephant
(the opaque Google algorithm). That's why SEO practitioners still get
blindsided by new search engine changes by Google.

------
snide
I worked building content sites pre-youtube stars that the same audience
gravitates towards. Primarily, I was one of the main designers on giantbomb
and gamespot over the years.

The publishing industry is kind of terrible, and the line between real
journalism and critique died somewhere around 2008. If I were to pick a point,
I'd look to when Jeff was fired by CNET after he gave Kane and Lynch an
unfavorable review. But you can see it in the degradation of every major
gaming news outlet that used to have full-time employees with a platform
stable enough to not bow down to PR teams.

That type of blowback would never happen today because any journalistic wall
between the PR folks pushing these products and the content creators no longer
exists. YouTube has successfully weaponized content. We like to talk a lot
today about how great it is that we don't see ads. That's kind of lie. They
are certainly there and we see them everyday, it's just now embedded in the
content itself. The journos can't compete, because the PR firms block access
to coverage unless the story is preconceived. As an example, back in the day
we used to boycott Call of Duty "review" events where they'd fly you in a
helicopter at a hotel so you could play the game for 6 hours with someone over
your shoulder.

Fandom and "fun" content creation was always a loose proposition ("will i
still be doing this at 40" was the bar night saying), but now it's just a
quick hit slog. I sympathize with these folks to a degree. They're all
independent, they all have no idea if this will be a job even next year, so of
course they will take on any sort of shilling to keep their dream going. They
need to hustle. It's like running a one-person startup.

I'm more worried about the 10s of thousands of other sad bedrooms where this
is pushed as a real industry and a way of life. When startups fail, we
engineers and designers fall back to jobs with the skills we learned. It's not
as easy for people whose skill was trying to be funny on camera. There's a lot
of people chasing the dream at the moment, and of course that's no different
than trying to be a movie star, but part of me winces when I open up twitch
and see that all this awkwardness is so public and often permanent.

If anyone is curious about where some of this could go, I'd recommend reading
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, a sort of near-future fiction
that got a lot of this stuff right before it happened. I consider it the
Network (as in the 70s movie) of our age. I fear for the day when the
influencers and streamers make their way out of their bedrooms and into our
public spaces, and we'll all be part of the show.

~~~
okareaman
> I fear for the day when the influencers and streamers make their way out of
> their bedrooms and into our public spaces, and we'll all be part of the
> show.

I read a lot of complaints about Instagram influencers at Burning Man and how
people (men) are trying to sabotage their video shoots by wandering behind the
shot with no pants on.

~~~
pjc50
That's hilarious. The way to privacy is to ... wander around naked, because
male nudity is outside the commoditisation zone?

~~~
okareaman
I don't know why, but there is something really unattractive about an older
man wearing a t-shirt and no pants (the recommended sabotage outfit.) I
imagine the teen audience of the influencers would feel uncomfortable by this.

------
josephorjoe
Something my kid said to me about YouTube last year (when he was 10) has
always stuck with me, even if it was just a kid's throwaway comment:

"There are basically four generations: the grandparents, the parents, the
YouTubers, and the kids."

The YouTubers seem to occupy that niche of ephemeral stardom previously
occupied primarily by pop musicians, movie actors, and professional athletes.

The athletes, actors, and musicians are still there (and some of them are of
course YouTubers too), but I'm sure my son and his friends know far more
'native' YouTubers than other celebrities.

Not sure what this all means, although it did make me start paying much more
attention to YouTube and led to some discussions with my son about what
"infotainment" is and the dangers implicit in it.

------
agumonkey
I'm repeating myself a lot. Life, and especially adult life, is far from easy.
The old world was slow, but it made people grow to their natural spot in a
somehow stabler way.

internet 2.1 feels like lightning.

~~~
Accujack
I'll tell you a secret: The world is pretty much the same as it's always been,
including the people. There are just more of them.

People don't deal with change well, but choosing to believe that the present
is an exception to how the human world has operated for millennia only has a
short term benefit - validation for those of us in the present. The negative
effects of this belief include cutting one's self off from all the experiences
of all the humans who came before us.

To learn how to deal with "Internet 2.1" in your life, consider reading some
Aristotle, Plato, Alvin Toffler or Eric Higgs.

~~~
tomc1985
The world didn't have mass many-to-many communication as little as 20-30 years
ago. There are a lot of changes in play that the current breed of humans
simply don't know how to deal with, _in addition to_ the fact that there are
simply more of us.

See: resurgence flat-earthers, neonazis, and other previously-buried-by-
irrelevance groups, resurgence of measles + polio, seemingly endless toxic
videos dispensed to young children via the 'next video' and 'recommendation'
engines, and so on

Sure human behavior is the same as it ever was, but never before has it been
so easy for me to affect some random schmuck in France, for example

~~~
Accujack
>The world didn't have mass many-to-many communication as little as 20-30
years ago. There are a lot of changes in play that the current breed of humans
simply don't know how to deal with

All humans, or the ones you've met? ;)

You prove my point for my by mentioning all those groups... those sorts of
people have ALWAYS been around, and probably will be as long as humanity
exists. Ever hear of the Luddites? Or the Optimates in ancient Rome?

Certainly, mass media and the internet are new iterations of information
distribution, but so were the printing press, the printed word itself, and
even bardic songs going back centuries. Each time, the ability to spread
information farther, faster and easier Changed Things.

There's a comfort in wanting to believe we live in an age that breaks all the
rules, so a lot of people soothe themselves by thinking that it's ok if
they're afraid of or not comfortable in the world because after all it's
something no one has ever had to deal with before. That lie gives us a
comforting feeling, and people prefer a comforting lie over a cold truth
anytime.

Sure, the ability to affect a random person in another country is sort of new,
but that's an artifact of the present level of technology we have. Having new
technology to deal with is actually the status quo of human history. We just
keep inventing.

Going back to the past, you could argue that the first printed bibles made it
possible to spread a religion faster and farther than ever before, which is
true... but the age in which the printing press was invented was not that
unlike all the other ages of man... looking back, it was a significant change,
but not an all changing event like the discovery of extra terrestrial life or
the human machine singularity would be.

We can deal with the world just like we always have.

~~~
tomc1985
> There's a comfort in wanting to believe we live in an age that breaks all
> the rules, so a lot of people soothe themselves by thinking that it's ok if
> they're afraid of or not comfortable in the world because after all it's
> something no one has ever had to deal with before. That lie gives us a
> comforting feeling, and people prefer a comforting lie over a cold truth
> anytime

You are right that the printing press was very disruptive for its time. But I
would say that every day since the beginning of the industrial revolution is
living in a time that "breaks all the rules" as you say

I could retort that it is comforting to call me the crazy one but I still
believe that this age of instant, accessible global communication is indeed
unique and that, psychologically, we as a species are not ready to deal with
it. All throughout history the groups that you and I speak of were always
relatively localized; it was very difficult to build a movement that affected
all of Europe, for example. Not impossible -- ideas were and are as infectious
as ever -- but beset with much much more entropy

Could Russia have facilitated the kind of propaganda/misinformation campaign
that it did for the 2016 elections without any of its ever needing to leave
their Moscow office in WWII? All else held constant, could these flat-
earther/antivax morons have reached nearly as many people and had their
movements spread as far and wide as they have in the age of the printing
press? No, because entropy. And even when movements did (Lutheranism, for
example), it took years to take hold.

------
JDiculous
I wish there were alternatives to the Youtube recommendation algorithm. The
algorithm in my opinion gives too much weight to frequent uploads of shallow
10+ minute videos (2 minutes of content stretched out to 10 minutes) filled
with filler and clickbait-y titles with obnoxious thumbnails. Perhaps there'd
be less burnout and increased viewer satisfaction if there were was a way to
watch Youtube with alternative recommendation algorithms.

~~~
UncleEntity
I've been watching way too much YouTubes lately and their algorithms seem to
do a fairly good job tracking my changing interests while also keeping me
current on the channels I like watching all the episodes -- all without ever
hitting the subscription button and only ever liking one video. Got on a
guitar videos kick lately and through the recommended videos discovered some
artists I really like listening to so win/win in my book...

------
bilekas
Not a huge surprise though, if you consider how much people (myself included)
spend just bindging YT videos, the pressure to produce more is crazy high. And
they take so much more time to create than watch.

But, nobody is forcing them.. So I mean.. Its self inflicted.. So its a bit
hard to garner sympathy.

~~~
Bootwizard
Taking a break for them is directly losing them money. Imagine how much money
a company loses by shutting down for say an entire week.

Imagine losing an entire week of revenue for the company. That's a big deal to
them.

Especially because their revenue is directly dependent on their popularity. If
their content isn't available, people will just move on to the next best
thing.

~~~
YayamiOmate
That's the same if you're a contractor or work on per hour basis.

Everyone's time has value. It's just more visible in certain cases. Streaming
and other modern entertainment stars are not the only ones who have this
problem. If fact it's true for everyone.

I guess it's kinda like with terminal disease. Everyone will die and noone
knows how much time they have ahead, but when you get a kind of tangible upper
limit then suddenly this awarness materializes, even though it shouldn't
change much. I think the parallel is that when you can estimate how much money
you could get for your time it's harder to discard it. If your time were worth
the same without your knowledge it'd be easier. It's just matter of being
aware of the number.

------
aiddun
From what I’ve heard, YouTube ad revenue drops significantly in January after
the holiday season, which is also sometimes a (contributing) factor in
YouTubers taking the month off

------
williamDafoe
They are managed by Robots. Just like Uber and Lyft. What did you expect?

------
tobyhinloopen
You can always just... queue a bunch of videos and schedule them for upload
while on vacation.

...right?

~~~
kawfey
Yes, but you lose recency in whatever you're talking about, especially if you
consistently upload a daily video that talks about yesterday's events. Even in
a gaming video some of the quips and tangents might be temporally relevant. In
other words, a two week old video talking about yesterday's impeachment is no
longer interesting to viewers because everyone's kneejerk opinions are already
settled.

------
FussyZeus
Pretty much any social media job like this, be it YouTuber or Instagram
influencer or whatever, seems to be all life-consuming. I would never advise
any friend to enter this business. Burnout is practically guaranteed with the
level of content the services demand.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _any social media job like this, be it YouTuber or Instagram influencer or
> whatever, seems to be all life-consuming_

Isn't this older than social media? Mass media stars, _e.g._ post-War movie
stars, were similarly all-consumed.

Maybe one has to go back to _e.g._ Charlie Chaplin to find an era when this
kind of celebrity wasn't the norm?

~~~
C1sc0cat
Plenty of stars got burned out in Charlie Chaplin's era

~~~
yareally
Including Chaplin himself who mostly stopped acting and releasing films by the
1930s other than one or two a decade.

------
techntoke
Prob getting burnt out on having to push clickbait via their partner network.
If people are upset at Facebook due to the 2016 elections, they should be
looking into these networks on YouTube.

~~~
reportgunner
We can only guess since the article is paywalled :)

~~~
ihuman
Click "web", then click the article. They allow you to view the full article
if you come from google.

~~~
reportgunner
Cheers I didn't know this.

I tried both in private tab and normal tab if firefox and article was still
paywalled.

Trying again in Chrome did the trick.

