> The idea of content creation as a full time career is relatively new, and I hate it.
I do too, but IMHO unfortunately us older generations have a lot to answer for when it comes to this. My teenage daughter plus all of her friends all want to be content creators. It's the 21st century equivalent of becoming a pop star or being a TV personality. As an industry we've automated away a lot of the jobs that these kids otherwise could have had, handed them a bunch of shitty tools and algorithms and shown them that this is a way to make money. I don't find their attitude all that surprising.
And it's not really new. Being a YouTuber or TikToker was obviously not possible before those platforms existed, but people were musicians, actors, or other sorts of performers, or wrote stuff that they tried to get published, it's all the same drive. Some wanted to do it to become a star and get paid, others did it for the love of the craft.
The internet is a new avenue for this, that's all.
>21st century equivalent of becoming a pop star or being a TV personality
Which were always lottery professions at best. Being influencers/YouTube stars/etc. may seem more accessible these days but it's probably mostly an illusion. There are (mostly) plenty of jobs but most of them are probably pretty unglamorous.
* It's more accessible to be an influencer today than a pop star 20 years ago
* Becoming an influencer is a lot like being a lottery winner.
Bands on the radio had massive audiences. A decent Youtuber is getting 10k views on their video, which is a much smaller piece of the pie than any band that aired on the radio in the early 2000s. But for every Youtuber with 10k views there's hundreds, maybe thousands, of Youtubers with videos in the single digit of views.
Conversely, there's far, far more "decent Youtubers" with 10k views now than there were bands on the radio 30 years ago. Only a very lucky few bands ever got airtime like that. 10k-view Youtubers are common.
Indeed and that's what I think is motivating so many people to become "content creators". And I don't know if that's a bad thing. If you're getting 10k views you have a comfy community around you and you're at the least making side income money. That's plenty to complement a not very demanding day job. Being a member of these comfy communities is fun, it's like being in a much smaller version of HN.
And my generation all wanted to be popstars, actors and models (well I wanted to program computers, but whatever). Kids don't change that much, it is just us who are getting older.
Totally, I quit high school at 15 to become a rock star. It didn't pan out.
I think the difference is the automation, the algorithms designed to maximise for maximum engagement of human attention. Growing up in the MTV generation, these algorithms were handled mostly by humans, and their reach was limited due to television, radio and print media being the dominant form of communication with the audience.
Now we have an Internet, everyone including our kids is connected, everything is only a click away, and the algorithms run at massive speed due to the compute power of today.
I do too, but IMHO unfortunately us older generations have a lot to answer for when it comes to this. My teenage daughter plus all of her friends all want to be content creators. It's the 21st century equivalent of becoming a pop star or being a TV personality. As an industry we've automated away a lot of the jobs that these kids otherwise could have had, handed them a bunch of shitty tools and algorithms and shown them that this is a way to make money. I don't find their attitude all that surprising.