YouTube stars heading for burnout | Hacker News Reader

YouTube stars heading for burnout

theguardian.com

140 pointscirrus-clouds169 comments

As stupid as this is going to sound, I think about this quite a bit in terms of writing a blog. I've wanted to do it for a long time and in the past people have been very kind and supportive of my writing. However, when I think about the reality of what it takes to make a successful blog, I get very nervous about it.

I mean, it's dumb because the chances of writing a successful blog is next to nil. And the way to exit the scene is easy: stop writing content. But it's the path that worries me. You need to write a lot of relevant content -- almost certainly more content than you can reasonably think about critically. You will be judged on that content. If you make a mistake or change your mind, then you can be treated very harshly. It seems that the masses have this binary view of their celebrities: genius or moron. The more popular you get, the more people have you in their sights aiming to plonk you firmly in the latter category.

For a long time, I've spent ridiculous amounts of time writing in safe havens like HN comment sections: because I truly love writing. I like thinking about stuff and breaking it down. I like explaining the insights that I find. And most of all, I like the fact that somebody reads what I write. I like thinking that I've connected with somebody else who I don't even know.

I seem to remember a set of rules for writers by Stephen King (although my recollection doesn't seem to match what Google returns to me). In one of them he says to prepare yourself for an unbelievable amount of criticism. It's this that worries me the most. I don't mind criticism, per se, but I don't want to have to deal with a reputation based on ideas formed from my prose.

"He's the dufus who believes that unit tests shouldn't test requirements. What a moron," is fine when I'm dealing with people who know me. It's down right terrifying when dealing with people who are potentially going to interview me for a job :-) A slight miscalculation in how you describe something, a popular misconception arising from rumours of your writing, or even just having a derpy day because you didn't think it through before you put pen to paper... And suddenly, you are the moron in the eyes of millions.

Like I said, it's putting the cart before the horse by a long, long way, but it still stops me from writing, which is a massive shame. Somehow I must overcome it (advice is welcome, BTW!)

I relate to this so much. I look up so much to people like Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex) and Murat Demirbas (Metadata) and innumerable multitudes of other writers and scholars, I think that I'll never get anywhere nearly as successful with my writing.

But then I realized I very very much don't care about socially-constructed standards of success, and I just stop giving a shit and write what I want, when I want.

Why not write under a pseudonym? If you don't want people to associate you with every little detail of your writing, the easiest thing to do is to disassociate your writing identity with your offline identity.

That's a good idea :-). It never even occurred to me...

Although when you get successful the amount of effort devoted to breaking your pseudonym increases. We lost several UK police bloggers to this and there was a nasty campaign by the press against Brooke Magnanti.

Yep, maintaining your secrecy is hard.

As an individual you have hundreds of different patters that define who you are. Even the market you post to can geographically limit the location you are in. Use an uncommon, but correct, spelling of a word?

Yeah but what if I want, at some later date, to prove that I am indeed the original author of the said text instead of an imposter ?

I relate to this 100% and at my age I started questioning if I should even continue to be a programmer, but then again, once you had the money and the way of life, it's impossible to toss it away for a very, VERY insecure future where you will be bashed, demeaned, and thrown pennies for stuff you poured your soul into. No thanks. Writing to me should be strictly hobby and no money should be involved because every job eventually burns you out by the mere premise that you are EXPECTED to continue doing it.

Best course of action is probably a pseudonym + random thoughts with an enabled comment section in a new blog. If the comments get toxic, delete/disable the entire comment section and continue writing regardless.

Many writers do the writing just to unload from their heads and souls into paper / electronic documents, and publish 5-10% of what they actually write.

In the end, do what makes your soul feel good, as cliche as it sounds. I am pondering the same thing I suggested and I am sure that I will eventually get to it. Don't forget that very creative and outright genius people "blossomed" past their 35 or even 45 years old mark.

You are not on a schedule. Take your personal development at your own pace.

This is, in my opinion, one of the biggest reasons for why anonymity is so important. Do you know what you call a person who never changes his view, even in rather extreme ways? Somebody who has the worldview of a child.

I give extensive thought and research to most, and I'd like to imagine all, things I believe. Yet because of this my views change somewhat regularly as more evidence comes to light, or past evidence I relied on is shown to be doubtful. And consequently if you took my views over time as a 'blog', I'd seem to contradict myself constantly over the years - which ironically would be quite well on that path to moron categorization.

I think this is yet another reason any form of social media, under actual identity, is just a bad idea. It encourages people to double down even when they know they're wrong for fear of the evolution of their views being used against them. Get sufficiently far into the spotlight and you'll no longer be able to make a single statement without fear of it being scrutinized, analyzed, and ultimately weaponized against you if possible. And it never ends. Did you hear Einstein was a racist? Yeah, totally. Because the media got their hands on a handful of private observations he wrote in his diary in the early 1920s...

Been writing on my blog, on and off, for... I don't even remember anymore (12 years?) I try to write as I am (a bit toned down probably): if I write something that a potential employer might not like, it was going to happen anyway in person (and I'm not so sure a potential employer may be that interested in digging into my writing).

If you want to write, write!

I have something in common: I find it much easier to write comments, or stackoverflow answers, because I'm not writing into a blank page and I have something to engage with.

I've genuinely considered trying to automatically extract my top N HN comments (I have 36k karma), roughly categorise them, and turn them into a book with extra commentary and thematic linking. I'd call it "Silicon Valley on ten upvotes a day".

I've also considered trying to write a definitive long-form answer for all those people on electronics.stackexchange who get confused by electrons and current flow.

I too write better on comments, reddit/hackernews/etc. Because you are actually talking with someone.

I use these writings as a starting point when I write a blogpost. I look at my hackernews posts when I get stuck, but its kind of messy to find all the comments I've made

Scraping yourself and doing big data on yourself is what I am ultimately moving towards as well. Hackernews has an open API

My writing is terrible when it comes to my personal blog. I write much better content in hackernews, because I'm actually conversing with someone.

I think it really depends what you want out your blog. Mine is a personal blog. Its not going to be "successful" and I don't intend it to be. For the record I have 10,000 page views. Because I write it for myself, not anyone else. People mediate, I blog. That's how I reflect on things I learned. I want those experiences to live somewhere outside my mind, because its a lot of cognitive overhead to remember. It could be a blog. Or a vlog. Doesn't matter. But it needs to be public though attached with my real name. I've spent far too long writing under pseudonyms, some having 100k+ views on a page.

Normally I lock myself in a room for 3 hours once every 2 weeks. Then I force myself to write about one topic, of the 100 idea drafts I have. Most of these writing topics come from posting comments from hackernews.

> And suddenly, you are the moron in the eyes of millions.

I'd rather be known as a once previous moron than be an unknown no one knows about. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

I can totally relate to this. I have a bunch of notes and potential blog posts in plain text and markdown waiting to be published. I like to write, its one of my most cherished skills. My fear of petty, shallow criticism and my fear of being stereotyped keeps me from publishing them but nothing will ever stop me from writing it. Writing has given me the clarity and stability of thought that nothing else has. Also converting them into posts that someone might need is pretty simple as long as the essence of the thoughts are captured. I'd say keep writing. Publish opinions anonymously and technical/unopinionated content attributed to your real name. That seems the sanest approach I can think of with least side effects.

The BBC made a brilliant spoof series on becoming a YouTube vlogger called 'Pls Like'. The whole thing is available on YouTube to watch (not geo-blocked as far I know). It's 6 episodes of 15 mins each.

No matter which country you're from, you'll recognise all the vlogger types in the series: the lifestyle vlogger, the fashion vlogger, the prankster etc. It actually touches on a lot of the issues in the Guardian article: the need for views, the pressure to make content 'viral', sponsored content, rivalry between vloggers. It's all done with a lot of humour while highlighting these issues.

I thoroughly recommend it (and in case you are wondering, the vloggers are all actors, not real vloggers):

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL64ScZt2I7wFF538Kn0TR...

pretty damn well made series!

I respect people who have the ability to entertain thousands of viewers, I really do. At the same time I’m really happy that wasn’t even an option when I was young. I’m sure I would have spent even more time playing video games if esports, twitch and YouTube had been a thing in the 90ies.

I know, I know, not everyone is alike, but at age 35 I’m really happy that my job involves serious adult challenges, and that my success in life isn’t depending on thousands of teenagers pushing a like button.

> my success in life isn’t depending on thousands of teenagers pushing a like button

In a certain sense, though, most serious adult business still boils down to people seeing an ad, installing an app, buying a product, attracting investors, or teenagers clicking a like button.

Edit: The YouTubers who go on to do it at a more serious capacity will also learn valuable first-hand lessons in dealing with partnerships, sponsors, public relations, release cycles, etc. All of which are useful depending on what it is that you want to do in your career.

>In a certain sense, though, most serious adult business still boils down to people seeing an ad, installing an app, buying a product, attracting investors, or teenagers clicking a like button.

I mean, yes, I'm part of the machine, and the machine does sell advertising. But I'm a little cog in a big machine, and there are a lot of other cogs between me and the teenagers and their like buttons.

A long time ago, I wrote a technical book. One of the weirdest things to me was just how much reading the amazon reviews hurt. Like, they were mostly positive, but the negative ones, even negative reviews that as a buyer I would dismiss as 'clearly nutso' really hurt in a deeply irrational way.

At my dayjob? not only is it someone else's job to worry about that sort of thing, the volume involved would make it almost impossible for me to consume the feedback in anything other than a statistically sampled sort of way, even if it was my job.

If you think this is problematic, say, providing for teenagers to click like buttons rather than confronting global warming or extreme wealth inequality, the question then is why do things have to be this way?

Ads drive less than 10% of all revenue. Ads make a difference in competitor market share, when saturated, tipping swing votes in a deadlock. In many other scenarios, ad exposure has no measurable effect of success or failure.

You have a point. I work in the public sector though. Last week I facilitated workshops to analyze how the administration can better implement an IT system as well as the organizational change-management for thousands of employees. If they listen and actually spend the necessary resources (they won’t), it’ll mean better quality for patients and a better work environment for our employees. For me that’s worth a lot more, but like I said, everyone should find their own path.

I just worry about the longer prospects of getting in to social media content creation, and where it leaves you if you want to change paths. I’ve been on quite a few hiring boards and I’ve never seen social media followers benefit anyone. We’re not the most obvious sector where it would benefit you, but I have a friend in journalism and when I discussed this with him, he said they looked at it, but also that the platforms make it so easy that success on YouTube doesn’t necessarily teach you anything useful.

I think I’m more in agreement with you. I personally think some educational youtubers would make good teachers. I also think they’d never get hired, however, because they don’t have the right education and because they are competing with people who have actual teaching experience.

Like I said, everyone should do their own thing, and I respect youtubers for following their dreams and succeeding. I’m just worried about the longevity of it, and I’m mostly worried because I don’t want my own children to get trapped in something that might not last them. I loved video games in my teens and my early twenties, today I haven’t played one in years. Of course not everyone will burn out on their young adult hobbies like I have.

True, but we get to "outsource" those worries to a marketing department, who hopefully have a better handle on audiences than we do.

> but at age 35 I’m really happy that my job involves serious adult challenges

Highly doubt that if you are commenting on a social media platform. What's an "adult" challenge?

> and that my success in life isn’t depending on thousands of teenagers pushing a like button.

Sure it does. From journalist to software programmers and everyone in between.

>Highly doubt that if you are commenting on a social media platform

Because adults don't use social media platforms? And HN is not exactly Snapchat either...

>Sure it does. From journalist to software programmers and everyone in between.

Most businesses around the world could not care less for "journalists", "software programmers" and "everyone in between". We're not all working on Facebook, Apple, and co, or even on internet businesses.

There are billions of people working in places that at best have some static website, and people just walk in and buy stuff for example. Or B2B, or services, and so on. And for most of these neither their website matters much (if at all), not do they deal with media writing about them (or care).

The neoliberal condition is in part characterized by the entrepreneurialization of everything, the penetration of Michel Foucault's homo economicus (entrepreneur of the self) into more and more spheres of production, consumption, and everyday life. Increasingly, you're an "entrepreneur" no matter what, whether you're a food truck owner, a freelance designer, an Uber driver, an Airbnb host, a YouTube star. Entrepreneur means a blurring of boundaries, working from home, homing from work.

In my possibly-naive opinion, it wouldn't be such a problem, if only we didn't tie value and self-worth so much on work, both culturally and politically. This entrepreneurialization goes hand-in-hand with the condition of precarity, feeling like you have to work your ass off, have to stay at the top of your game, to keep making a living, because you have no other way to live. It is incredibly dangerous, and it's increasingly defining us, the millennial and post-millennial generations.

As a clarification, Foucault did not define the term Homo Economicus [1]. He used the concept from Economics to describe the atomization of the individual inside the capitalist state structure, in contest with the "State" as a push-pull with that power structure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus

This is true, but I mostly know of the concept from Foucault's lectures in The Birth of Biopolitics (in particular the "atomization" aspect you mentioned), which I think is slightly different from those other definitions (which is also why I said "Foucault's").

It's not so much different, as it's derivative and muddily so.

Foucault had a tendency to re-define terms as he saw fit, irrespective of their historical use - as his philosophy would encourage - which is partly why the majority of his writing is so obtuse to other philosophers.

Obtuse, full stop.

>This entrepreneurialization goes hand-in-hand with the condition of precarity, feeling like you have to work your ass off, have to stay at the top of your game, to keep making a living, because you have no other way to live.

It's more of a precarization than an entrepreneurialization.

An entrepreneur has bigger stakes but also a bigger payoff than being paid to ride their car as an Uber for example.

I would really say that they're different sides of the same coin. I also wouldn't say that an entrepreneur necessarily has noticeably bigger payoff. It might be true in tech, but not necessarily for the majority of small businesses.

I can't recall off the top of my head which one, but I remember seeing a study that showed that a significant amount of small business owners in the US did so just to get to do what they want for a living. (Again, why the "for a living"?)

Entrepreneurialism, in a lot of cases, is a new kind of wage slavery. The precarity is the most easily exploited (by rideshare services, freelance agencies, marketplace platforms, among others) to coax people into positions without security or benefits.

For a living probably means something else now than the past.

Past: For a living - so I don't starve to death.

Now: For a living - I want the perceived freedom in choice of work that fits my lifestyle.

Yeah, we're not happy to just have the fire, speak in languages, and live in caves either.

We don't compare ourselves with the early humans before they discovered those things and feel lucky.

And neither those that starved to death did.

What constitutes "a living" is always relative.

That said, you can very much still starve and get sick and homeless to death in modern rich societies...

> ... because you have no other way to live.

what other way is there to live then?

As a very very basic example: UBI.

Most descriptions of UBI I’ve read so far seem to indicate that the problem would get even worse, as people are free to pursue their interests instead of their boring jobs, and their interests are competitive creative fields like writing, painting, being a YouTube star, etc. Even if survival isn’t tied to success, people will still want views and recognition.

In my experience the frustrating part about YouTube is when the crowd wants content that you're not interested in making.

For instance, I've made a few videos about building clusters from Raspberry Pi's, which I did just for kicks and to have something to play around with. They get more attention than my (imo more interesting) videos about programming or various other electronics topics, to the point that it dwarfs my other views.

So I have to choose between disappointing the majority of my subscribers or making content that I don't actually enjoy or stand by just for the views.

PS: I also learned very quickly that the YouTube comments section is chaotic and is not a recommended place for someone looking for thoughtful critique on their material.

"I also learned very quickly that the YouTube comments section is chaotic and is not a recommended place for someone looking for thoughtful critique on their material."

YouTube's comments are some of the absolute worst I've seen on the web. It's interesting that YouTube has made no effective efforts to improve their quality.

You'd think the site as a whole could benefit tremendously from quality comments, but apparently that is not a priority.

The article wonders if YouTube has a deliberate trollbait policy for its comments because it "improves engagement."

So it's possible that civil comments are not just not a priority, but actively contraindicated.

The answer is yes. Dislikes allegedly count 100% as much for the engagement algo as likes.

The problem is that 1 in 1000 of them are actually thoughtful questions or genuinely grateful feedback that you don't want to miss. You just have to dig through 999 comments saying "you suck" or "send me something for free".

YouTube comments do not scale for moderation; its such a huge platform that it's likely not profitable to pay people to put a dent in it. Instead they expect the content creators to do it if they care to shape their own image.

> It's interesting that YouTube has made no effective efforts to improve their quality. //

You imply it, but it's worth noting that they have made efforts but failed/stopped. Google can't/won't fix it. I suspect as someone else mentioned they realised that fixing comment quality reduces "engagement"; like tabloid news.

> fixing comment quality reduces "engagement"

I’ll admit to occasionally scrolling through the comments looking for the batshit crazy ones, if only because they tend to be funny and interesting in the totally unexpected way they managed to get offended about something.

It's like laughing at the badguys in pro wrestling

> YouTube's comments are some of the absolute worst I've seen on the web. It's interesting that YouTube has made no effective efforts to improve their quality.

For lowest common denominator kind of content, I absolutely agree.

However, as soon as you step even a little bit off the beaten path, comments become a lot more reasonable and often interesting/useful. On all the videos on all of the channels I actually subscribe to, the comments are not bad. There are random assholes here and there, but they seem to be mostly shunned by the rest.

They did try to fix it by linking your actual name with your comments by using Google plus but that had a huge backlash so was reversed.

>YouTube's comments are some of the absolute worst I've seen on the web.

For me it's the exact opposite. YouTube's comment are the absolute freer speech I've seen on the web, warts and all. It's also some of the most touching

Plus, because it starts with videos, which are much more universal than a blog post, it's a meeting point for people of all countries, races, religions, views on life, and so on.

Randall's mockery from 2006 still applies:

https://xkcd.com/202/

Also this Theoatmeal comic sums it up as well (the Mona Lisa comparison must be about Youtube's comments imho):

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/making_things

Matthew Innman (the author of the TheOatmeal) is nothing short of amazing. I have read all of his stuff and he is absolutely on point whatever he addresses.

I like writing about math and physics, but the views on my Ethereum articles are 500x higher, I measured. But that's how the world works. If you want money or attention, you have to serve people.

Unless you're relying on your YouTube channel for money, who cares what subscribers want? What's the worst they can do? Unsubscribe. No big deal--you're not trying to make money.

I've put up a few YouTube videos, I've got a few GitHub repos, etc. I don't even care how many likes or views or stars they get. I almost never even go back to the pages. When I publish something on the web I do it because I already finished it, and I think maybe someone else might like it or find it useful. But I'm not going to change what I like to do based on likes or stars. That sounds backwards.

I've never once in my life did something as a hobby and asked myself "How can I optimize for how many people will like/use this?"

Which is the right attitude if you're not trying to make a living off of youtube. For those who are, they have to care about what the subscribers want.

True, but at this point it becomes your job and not something you're /just/ doing for fun. If you can't find a way to tolerate making content that pays the bills, then perhaps the entertainment business isn't right for you.

Yes, and if you want to make pizza for yourself then you don't need to worry about what toppings you put on it.

But if you want to sell your pizzas (even if just for a bit of extra cash and as an experiment to see if the pizza business is right for you) then you need to ask what kind of pizza the people want.

I have an YouTube channel, mostly for personal stuff. I did some effort to record some videos about several subjects, none had more than a hundred viewers. Then, in a sudden, a very shaky and short video with a Mallet steam locomotive punctured the Algorithm Wall and had thousands of views per day... I was even making $20/mo off YouTube until the early 2018 changes took place.

And the fact is, divisive content is king these days. Nobody, humans or algorithms, are interested in balanced opinions these days.

>these days.

Doubt they ever were.

How many of the Nazis and other super divisive youtubers do you think are faking it or hamming it up for clicks? I do sometimes wonder "do these people actually believe this crap?" Same goes for totally outlandish conspiracy theories.

Controversy has always sold, but never before has the feedback loop been so tight.

Not believing what you speak is a huge enthusiasm killer, and enthusiasm is most of what makes a good video. I'd guess almost all of the people with growing channels believe what they speak, and anyone on the fence might even subconsciously start believe what their audience wants.

Except I can fake enthusiasm easily. I don't because it's deceptive. I feel like I am lying to someone when I fake enthusiasm. Doesn't go over all that well in most settings, since most people do fake it.

I think OP means more personal enthusiasm, as in being driven to make videos at all. No benefit in being able to fake a smile if you never end up recording yourself in the first place.

...at the same time though, a ton of money and attention might be enough to get over making personally uninteresting content. I guess that's pretty much how careers are for most people.

But can you fake enthusiasm full-time for years as well as someone who is actually enthusiastic? Because otherwise you'll be outcompeted.

The best liars totally believe what they say in the moment they say it. They have the ability to fool themselves, which is essential to fool others.

It's probably an evolutionary trait.

This [1] is anecdotal only but I thought it was interesting:

"i know from some behind-the-scenes youtuber talk that a few of the softer antifem/rightwing channels don't like how extreme a lot of their audience have become, and are scared of putting anything out that causes them to get ditched. they have bills to pay, after all"

[1] https://curiouscat.me/Shaun_Jen/post/639484603?1536142106

I dont think it matters what they belive or dont. They are one person. What matters is that some portion of thier viewers do and take action upon those beliefs. Changing your vote because of some ranting youtube clip is one thing, picking up a gun and going to a pizza joint another. Infowars was a start, but youtube needs to get on top of this asap.

(Something changed for me last month. Youtube started suggesting very bad vids. I watched a series about german castles, some of which were used in WW2 by you know who. I guess that made me a skinhead according to youtubed robots. I deleted all those cookies asafp.)

There are nazi youtubers?

I won't lie im right wing but the only Nazi I can think of who manages to get around on youtube would be eric striker.

Conspiracy theories sure, plenty of those around but nazis? Maybe there are hundreds of accounts out there with 100s of views between them i've never seen before.

you can call it by the new buzzword if you want - "the alt-right".share the common trait with nazi that they believe/invent pseudo-science that PROVES that they are superior & moral/societal degeneration occurs as a result of the left's policies/actions. also some of them hate jews/minorities. intersectional nazi?

I've unwittingly enjoyed Matt Lee's content on 'Shut Up and Sit Down', a board game review channel. I've always found him, and his colleagues, really good at what they do and find it professional.

I didn't know about Matt's background on Youtube, but a bit of Googling and I found he's had a really rough ride. As well as the stress and health problems others have mentioned, his wife also developed cancer a few years ago and was very close to dying.

All the while he still manages to produce witty, engaging content for a fickle audience. Honestly, the guy deserves a bit more respect for his craft than the comments in this thread are giving.

I don't find this surprising. When I started podcasting in 2005, even doing a weekly 'cast with my friend and co-host was a lot of work. We also had day jobs. But the pressure to create content was still there. These full time youtubers must feel in 100x more, particularly if they have Patreon people to keep happy. We derived no income from our show, and in fact it cost us money to produce.

In some ways I wish some of these monetizing platforms existed when we were around. It would have been fun to see if we could have gone anywhere with it. But then we might have succumb to these issues, as well.

I guess it all comes back to "Be careful what you wish for..."

> they have Patreon people to keep happy

Reminds me of when I briefly accepted donations from users of my forum. Suddenly it was like my life was beholden to people that had once given me $5. At least when they'd given me $0, it was pretty straightforward to dismiss their complaints and they'd looked silly when they'd demanded more of my free time. But once they gave >$0, the water got murky.

I ended up refunding everyone a few months later and I generally roll my eyes when I see posts like "um why not just take donations?" on HN.

It's just not no-strings-attached money like people seem to think it is. It's more akin to selling a service for peanuts, it rears the same issues.

I have the same issue. A partial solution is to only accept anonymous donations (eg. on Liberapay). Even better if you have multiple projects and don't know which one is getting you the donations.

This makes me think of how moot (creator of 4chan) was against receiving donations from 4chan users, presumably because of this type of issue. He later started selling "4chan passes" which added certain specific features to the site. I think that was a very clever way to go about it: the people who bought them couldn't demand moot's attention. They got a very specific thing out of their money and everyone knew that.

Considering these cases, I think it makes sense to make sure that whenever one accepts donations, they make it very explicit what the donator can rightfully expect. That could be as little as a token set of extra features, a badge on their user profile, or just warm fuzzy feelings without extra attention.

Perhaps a different mentality for donations helps too. People who solicit donations should somehow communicate that you are not buying a service of some kind, they are donating to you, so you're free to take the money and do whatever. It's a strange thing however when people donate a pittance (five dollars or ten dollars or something) and then expect so much for it. When you pay five dollars for a coffee, you are at least paying for something. But the word "donation" never seemed to me like it carried any serious commitment on the part of the recipient.

Perhaps the only thing the donor can expect is the recipient is to continue whatever they were doing. Beyond that it's ridiculous.

A podcast I know of has a "membership" concept which gives extra content. Once, an angry member sent an email deriding changes in the show that the rest of us enjoyed (specifically, antics by one of the co-hosts). The main host derided their email on air, saying that they'd gladly let go of the donor's membership[0]. I know you can't really do that if everyone is complaining about the same thing--in which the situation reaches a different regime, but for one off complaints, you'd be surprised how much people will recognize the bullshit and welcome your explanations how you can't please every one-off suggestion.

[0] Of course, they kindly did not identify the angry member.

If my friend wanted to start producing content again, I'd do it in a second. Getting together for a few hours a week to create a ~45 minute podcast was tons of fun, and the conversation was very therapeutic.

I enjoyed the conversation. The back and forth. Many people have suggested I do something on my own, but I have no idea what that would be. And with stories like these, I'm less likely to dive in.

I'm an audio engineer so I enjoy the production end of things, but I enjoy video editing less than straight up audio editing. But people are suggesting I do some sort of youtube channel.

Ah, who knows! :-)

This article is really relatable. Personal story time. I recently had a mini hit on Reddit where I started a community that's about 2800 people who come to me for marketing tips every day. It's both exhilarating and terrifying. Having a community, making content about my passion, and being able to perform is really all I've ever wanted. On the other hand I'm insanely cognizant of losing it at any time. There is no break and I know even a slight lull can stop it before it ever really even gets close to its potential. God forbid I give bad advice, or someone 1 ups me in the comments and I'm no longer the expert. That combined with the fact that most marketing isn't all that interesting has me increasingly searching for more and more all the time ever cognizant I don't want to bore and lose my audience. I've been mitigating this by filming 3 videos a day and embracing an intentionally raw style, but it still requires daily upkeep in addition to my agency which demands 10 to 12 hours anyways. Don't get me wrong I love it and I'm insanely grateful, but there is a lot of stress that surrounds this sort of thing.

I think a lot of the concern for upkeep is simply overblown.

I follow several vloggers, bloggers, etc. Once they've built a basic following, they can do whatever, even disappear for weeks or months, and still have most or all of their followers intact and craving for more content.

I know, because me and tons of others, are waiting for new content from some such people who took huge break times off, and when it appears views always shoot through the roof. And I don't see Subscription counts fall of that much either (e.g. to the point that it makes any difference, e.g. going from 200K to 150K or so). It's easier to just ignore a channel that hasn't posted videos for a while, than to actively unsubscribe (besides, not getting posts is no reason to unsubscribe if you'd still like what they can possibly post in the future).

  Ninja, makes an estimated $500,000 (£384,000) every 
  month via live broadcasts of him playing the video 
  game Fortnite on Twitch, a service for livestreaming 
  video games that is owned by Amazon. Most of Blevins’ 
  revenue comes from Twitch subscribers or viewers who 
  provide one-off donations (often in the hope that he 
  will thank them by name “on air”).

There is something fantastically wrong about the way internet economies operate. In the same way so many other sub-economies panhandle, in exchange for absolutely nothing.

> Like all YouTubers, Morton also feels the financial pressure of the system, which typically pays between £1.50 and £3 for every 1,000 views.

Based on this, creators have to be close to the 1 million views per month mark to be making over $24,000 per year.

It's no secret that YouTube is wildly unprofitable, from every angle. In a way, it's a transfer of wealth from AdWords, so our society is paying for YouTube through ads; just mostly not through the ads on YouTube.

YouTube is unprofitable if you look at direct compensation alone, if you have even 1M views per year not to mention a month you can find partnerships and sponsorships.

I don't understand why people think YouTube should pay more, the vast majority of YT content doesn't cost anything to create nor does it generate any revenue for YT.

Besides the really large channels the best thing one can do is to run a channel is parallel to their business and in support of it which is what many of the smaller DYI/Maker/Professional/Vocational channels do you run a machine shop you make a few videos per month and you draw more business rather than rely on ad revenue.

> the vast majority of YT content doesn't cost anything to create

And does that painfully show. You basically have to build a small TV studio, or invest in computer graphics software and skills, to produce good content on a regular basis. And good writing also. None of these things are free.

And this devalues the time of these independent video producers, They could be producing high value for another business, with appropriate compensation.

This is an interesting story, definitely worth a click, but isn't it sort of also just the fundamental issues humans face in all pursuits that are based on interest?

I feel like you'd get the same spirit of complaint from a disenchanted musician, actor, chef, or even entrepreneur.

"It's a lot harder than I thought. The market's tastes are fickle, I've got to make stuff to please them instead of things that creatively satisfy me. If I stop relentlessly competing I can't pay my bills"

I'm older than the average youtube star, but I don't begrudge their success or view them as trivial people like a lot of my peers. That said, perhaps it's the _initial_ grand slam success and money that is the aberration (like app store hits at their peak), and the "bad side" is simply a sort of market correction where you've got to do unenjoyable things roughly commensurate with the payoff.

The story of these youtubers certainly has strong echoes of other show business type careers.

>creators feel disposable ... in the knowledge that there are younger, fresher people waiting in the wings to replace them.

That sounds a lot like actors in particular. Today's hot new star is tomorrow's has been.

Over the last several years I gradually changed from being very salty and grumpy -- "FFS, these goofy kids get to squeal on air and get rich and buy a house I won't likely have at 50, WTF is that!!!" -- to basically accepting how most of our current world's economy works and I moved to the milder attitude of "hey, if you can make it work then more power to you, and good job!".

I think the only bad thing in this picture is their initial huge success, like you seem to believe as well. This produces very unrealistic future expectations and the cognitive dissonance becomes nigh-impossible to face in the aftermath.

This leads to articles such as this one.

In my eyes everybody should learn to work hard and the value of money but some are skipping these steps with a big initial success and when reality finally kicks in, they are much less prepared to face it.

Sad, but it's part of one's own personal development. Can't be avoided.

But what is reality, for whom? For what amount of people? What of those who never hit this "reality" at all? They exist, and a comment like yours is mysteriously never addressed to them, and it's not clear where this personal development would occur or why.

I see this as a good thing. It makes people expect more, demand more, raise issues. Because the issue in the blog is worth raising. Otherwise, they'll just settle for what is. And the is has never been very good.

The cognitive dissonance was from assuming that the world was fair, but you make this mistake as well.

Reality is malleable and changes constantly, one day your core skill is learning how to throw a spear the next it's how to manage computers; it's all rather unreliable and it differs very strongly depending on where you ended up...

By "reality" I mostly meant "what is statistically often found almost everywhere" -- sorry for not clarifying. By saying "when reality sets in" I mean to say "when one day nobody can carry you through life anymore, including your luck from previous phases, and you actually have to work really hard for a fraction of what you barely worked for before".

And yes, reality is maleable. That's both very good and very bad.

As for me assuming the world is fair, definitely not! The world is anything but fair...

I guess any activity that requires repetition becomes bleak sooner or later because brain craves variety. I guess it can be the inner voice telling that by getting obsessed over only one thing, you can miss out the chance to explore other aspects of life. But as it has been said, everything sucks, most of the time we're simply choosing what sucks less.

> I guess any activity that requires repetition becomes bleak sooner or later because brain craves variety.

You nailed it.

And that's a huge problem for the current economical state of affairs; people start enthusiastically but eventually want to move on. By that time however, they have a family to care for, mortgage where they cannot miss a single installment, are generally tired, and cannot afford to make a decisive U-turn in their lives.

It's extremely saddening, I watched many bright and smiley people turn into grumpy drones because of that tendency. One of the worst things you could see in life. :(

As with everything else there is always a spectrum and this represents the dark end of the spectrum. I follow a bunch of tech youtubers (like MKBHD) who represent the happy side of the spectrum.

The main problem is it's self-managed work. Given lack of advisory and guidance, or the structure of conventional workplaces and school, many people will mismanage their work-life balance. Even with structure I have problems sometimes managing my overall workload and side projects.

It's certainly not Youtube at fault here, but it's definitely a valid issue every independent worker has to face. Discussion and exchanging solutions is a good thing.

How is this different than any other prestigious high performance job? Okay great, you busted your ass and you made it to the top, and now you have to bust your ass to stay there. I also don’t really think it’s fair to attach YouTube to the title. This article can be applied to all social media celebrities in all their various platforms.

I wonder if this is specific to YouTube in any way. E.g., I'd stop visiting xkcd if Randall didn't keep uploading regularly. Most open source projects (including mine) turn into GitHub graveyard because we can't provide even the most basic maintenance and support. Lots of traditional-media pop stars have also famously burnt out.

In general, it is hard work to cultivate a proper institution that spreads out the load and makes this sustainable. And the skill for managing that is never really taught anywhere. Most "lone artists" don't even realize it's needed until it's too late. And that's where most of this frustration stems from. Culturally we focus too much on that one "big break", or the "eureka moment".

I'd watched a few videos talking about the old-time YouTube content generators in the "Wild West" of the site, compared with the current grind. They tweaked things so it only seems to make sense - monetization-wise - to be a content generator if you're able to keep up with posting high-quality content daily. Myself, I'd want to post great videos that people enjoy, and if the following grows, great! If not, I would just do what I want to do. If something else is more fun, I'll do that. But I'm not sure it's a good idea to try to make YouTube videos a work-from-home paying gig unless you really enjoy whatever content you're generating. And making regular, high-quality videos is a lot of work, not to mention regular, meaningful content that people with engage with. Otherwise, you're just screaming into the void.

I don't like how youtubers feel obligated to produce a certain amount of videos per week. I would prefer one or two videos per month with good quality than three or four per week with clickbait titles.

Who knew hard work can be hard, this reads less like an actual deep analysis and more like people complaining they need to actually put in work to get paid.

>‘invisible’ labour such as interacting with fans is ‘a major contributor to occupational stress. In many cases it can contribute to PTSD’.

Are you kidding me? they are not fans they are your "customers" or at least your "consumers" public and customer relations are a key part of nearly every business out there that doesn't rely on accidental walk-ins for the majority of their business.

If you can't handle it then hire someone who can or find another business, PTSD? from what? reading fan mail? even if it contains death threats you can't get PTSD from that there is no trauma, what you have here it just a lazy person that realized that omg running a business that serves tens of thousands of people daily is hard.

To be fair to the Youtube stars, this is exactly why famous authors and actors have publicity agents. The notion of celebrities interacting with the hoi polloi on a daily basis is a brand-new artifact of the Internet age.

What's happening is that today's celebrities are learning why their predecessors locked themselves away in secluded Hollywood mansions and rode around wearing sunglasses in heavily-tinted limousines.

So do "YouTube stars" most of the large channels are run by media companies either established one or ones that was set up to support the channel.

All the people they interviewed are relatively no-body they are small fish if anything their "mistake" wasn't taking it as a business they thought they can record a few videos on their phone edit them in FCP and make a metric ton of money hence the "winning the lottery" analogy that went through the article.

There aren't shortcuts in life people shouldn't expect to get paid for little to no effort put in, and yes if you are reaching 50,000 people by selling yourself you need to be willing to well whore yourself out because you are the product, if you are running a tech channel or something similar then you often run it closer to say how a TV channel would be run with different shows/segments, you can and do hire additional hosts/anchors and eventually build a whole media production group.

But even the "vlog" channels aren't a solo gig all the large ones did a behind the scenes videos which they showed just how many people are involved in producing those videos, if you have a revenue of say $500,000 you can't expect to be able to do on your own, even on half of that you can easily hire multiple people and still make a more than enough money.

Cameramen/crew, editors people to handle PR and out reach can be hired for $50K even with experience and in reality much less especially considering that given the production scope you can afford to hire people straight out of college or even high school.

> this reads less like an actual deep analysis and more like people complaining they need to actually put in work to get paid.

That is clearly not what they were saying. That is an incredibly callous way of dismissing someone else's problems.

From the article:

> Lees developed a thyroid problem, and began to experience more frequent and persistent stretches of depression.

There is a well-established link between thyroid issues and burnout. See this comment from Amy Hoy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5633063 The deeper takeaway is that burnout is not just someone saying "oh I don't like my job". It is a specific condition with measurable physical effects.

I almost burned out a few years ago. I quit the job I was working in, took a few months off, then looked for a less-demanding freelance job to recover. The thing is, in the "recovery" job, I actually worked about twice as many hours and was about 4x more productive. But it was majorly less stressful - I simply came in to the office in the morning, picked the latest tickets on Trello, worked on them, then went home.

In the previous job, I probably did about 20 hours actual work/week, and spent a lot of time twiddling my thumbs. But the organisation was in total chaos, with projects started and cancelled all over the place. I could go the extra mile on a piece of work and have it completely ignored, then get chewed out publicly for something I'd had no idea I was expected to do. I tried to be proactive and solve these problems, but it was an exercise in futility and frustration.

Burnout is not caused by "working hard", it's caused by a combination of things, usually some form of working hard and failing repeatedly, especially when the failure was caused by factors beyond your control (such as management politics, or in the case of YouTube stars, the all-powerful algorithm). This has been fairly well-researched and documented. Amy Hoy described it as "training your brain to associate hard work with failure", which is pretty succinct.

(For anyone who wants to learn more - burnout is pretty common amongst programmers and startup people - this is a good resource for overcoming some of the cognitive issues involved: https://www.thinkingdirections.com/blog/burnout/).

The Youtubers in the article described their problems clearly and eloquently, it enrages me to hear people callously dismiss them in this way.

Edit: Amy Hoy did not mention "training your brain to associate hard work with failure", it was this commenter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630618

Thanks for linking this, it's a fantastic insight.

> PTSD? from what? reading fan mail? even if it contains death threats you can't get PTSD from that there is no trauma

There is a solid kernal of truth here, PTSD generally relies on clear and obvious trauma... That said, CPTSD has lots of nuanced angles, the original quote was "contribute[s] to" PTSD (not "cause"), and I think the required emotional investment to produce content vs horrendous comment content from YouTube commenters has been overlooked.

Particularly on an IT forum: stress stemming from continuous urgency and unending negativity, a la customer support or helpdesk work, is a major problem and a silent killer. Combined with burnout? That's where you get into serious health issues. Chronic stress combined with feelings of helplessness, being overwhelmed, or being attacked cause trauma by themselves. Socially we are terrible at addressing those burdens on our employees, and it stretches into PTSD-ish territory

Reading fan mail? How about rape and death threats? How about invasive comments about how your nipples have been showing more/less with each video? How about abject racism and brutal sexism and blatant trolling about your appearance? That's before we get to unrelenting shit talking about you and your work...

You may very well be right that PTSD isn't always a precise diagnosis of the issue. But if anyone is getting regular death threats based on something important to them over a long period of time, then the nuanced distinctions between life-destroying stress conditions, PTSD, and CPTSD are something they're gonna spend some time discussing with their therapist. That's how our brains work.

You are very uninformed at the potential for being bullied and pressure being a public figure on YT may entail.

It's the same with actors/actresses, I'd say it could be even worse.

Open Source developers suffer some of this as well, no wonder Linus has to "bang on the table" once in a while. It is to cut on the BS

Surprise. It's just a new face on an ancient profession: Entertainment. And it comes with similar challenges.

I've noticed a few big YouTubers talking about burnout. Smooth McGroove most recently comes to mind.

Sometimes the most bitter poison is everything you’d ever asked for.

Humans really are terrible at estimating what will make them happy.

Well it's all phases, is it not? Who says you will have a perfect idea at 16 about what will make you happy until you die? That's definitely not how humans work.

All of us know people who did U-turns in their lives at 30+. Some even at 50 or 60.

There’s that, but some of the research I’ve read says that humans are really bad at predicting how future events will affect their emotional state, regardless of age.

> Divisive content is the king of online media today, and YouTube heavily boosts anything that riles people up [...]

I look upon this idea skeptically. In my experience, the content delivered to me is as divisive as the videos I've already watched. If someone is getting divisive content, that's probably the content that they want to watch. Is it really up to YouTube to determine if a person has been watching content that's too divisive, like a bartender who cuts off a someone who's had too many drinks?

When I log out of my YouTube account or open YouTube in incognito mode, all I see are viral videos and nothing that's "divisive". For example, the YouTube homepage without being logged in shows prank videos, Rube Goldberg type fascination videos, educational videos, Mexican music, daytime TV crap, SNL skits, and pop music.

So basically, in order to get to the divisive stuff, you have to already be using search queries that will bring one to political commentators.

But then what should be done? If someone is watching a lot of videos by the far left, should the recommended videos proportionally include more videos by right wing commentators? Is this really what people want?

Sorry that this is tangental from the actual point of the article, but I've read of this idea multiple times before and it's always asserted as if it's a matter of fact, but I'm not sure I buy it.

I find that once Youtube thinks you want divisive content, it serves it up to you pretty regularly.

As an example, I have plenty of "X riles up SJWs" type videos and also their counterpart "X angers sexist Gamergaters" despite not watching these and trying to actively say "don't show me these things". Unfortunately, one bad click from Reddit and Youtube thinks I want this tripe.

It's not solely related to "divisive" content though - the same is true of content related to Fortnite, Buzzfeed, and anything else that mostly consists of clickbait content. Youtube is just optimising for engagement, regardless of how that engagement affects the viewer.

>I look upon this idea skeptically. In my experience, the content delivered to me is as divisive as the videos I've already watched. If someone is getting divisive content, that's probably the content that they want to watch.

Just a counterpoint, I think it depends largely on the subject matter. my 'disengage the brain' videos are mostly tool teardowns and slow-motion videos of milling machines, or reviews of '90s luxury cars.

If I let youtube pick the next video a few times in a row while I'm watching car videos, I end up in supercar land, (which is not very much fun for me, but not divisive or anything.)

If I let youtube pick the next video a few times while watching tool teardowns, I sometimes end up with more interesting tool talk, but I often get survivalist stuff, and sometimes 'sovereign citizen' stuff starts to creep in.

Are you sure about this? Often times, I find yt recommends videos in a manner to keep me on yt (like previous songs I've watched on repeat). And you bet divisive content gets people on their site.

May be in 2010 it gave related content. That was what I found most useful and I discovered a lot of content that way, that is, it did work in the way you suggest: showing me what I want. Now, it definitely shows me what I don't really but will probably cause me to load another page.

> If someone is getting divisive content, that's probably the content that they want to watch.

I recently used YouTube on a brand new browser installation to watch some clips from various adult cartoons. That was all. No other search terms, no interest in politics. Soon after, the Recommendations on the right side of the page started to be filled with – besides other cartoon clips – all kinds of polemic culture-war videos, on both sides of those wars. That really impressed on me just how funneled towards these videos people can be even if they show no overt interest in those topics.

I have a saved screenshot of when I was watching gaming videos (XCOM2) and all the recommendations were also XCOM2 videos .. and a live stream of UK far-right rabble-rouser Tommy Robinson.

I suspect (but of course can't prove without secret youtube data) that there's enough of a crossover between gaming and the far right that any gamer will eventually see far right videos, far more likely than they will be shown "far left" videos (these must exist, but I've no idea who they might be?)

The YouTube far-right community is much bigger than one might expect. There's a lot of actual fascists on youtube who get a lot of algorithmic promotion, but leftist youtube tends to be smaller and much less extreme - no "far left" by most definitions.

The same tends to be true in most spaces in my experience. Whatever the "far left" is tends to be a poorly defined boogieman, not a cohesive group--almost as if it were the eternal enemy of standard far-right ur-fascist theory!

The anxieties are tied up with the relentless nature of their work. Tyler Blevins, AKA Ninja, makes an estimated $500,000 (£384,000) every month via live broadcasts of him playing the video game Fortnite on Twitch, a service for livestreaming video games that is owned by Amazon. Most of Blevins’ revenue comes from Twitch subscribers or viewers who provide one-off donations (often in the hope that he will thank them by name “on air”). Blevins recently took to Twitter to complain that he didn’t feel he could stop streaming. “Wanna know the struggles of streaming over other jobs?” he wrote, perhaps ill-advisedly for someone with such a stratospheric income. “I left for less than 48 hours and lost 40,000 subscribers on Twitch. I’ll be back today… grinding again.”

This fits into the stereotype of Millennials as entitled. He makes 500k a month, but can't get off the hamster wheel? Poor soul.

Is that after or before taxes?

Before, no doubt. After, his existential travails only take more toll on his smug fatigue level.

Does it matter?

Before for certain.

Before taxes, he has about 100k subs who contribute around $5 each.

Loosing 40k subs is pretty significant, however I am not sure how that is possible in just 2 days. While there is an option to auto renew most twitch subscribers are not automatic, a person is usually watching the stream and chooses to subscribe. When subscription expires they can do so again. Assuming 140k subs are evenly distributed throughout the month the loss from not streaming for 48 hours should be 2/30 * 140k, this comes down to slightly less than 10k. Moreover most of these subs should rejoin once he starts streaming again.

You can see detailed breakdown here: https://twitchstats.net/subs/ninja

> who contribute around $5 each.

Doesn't Twitch take roughly 50% of that?

That's the most they take. Higher level partners get a better cut.

If he lost 40k subscribers, that's most likely 40k renewals that didn't happen -- and they're not going to happen until he broadcasts again. It's almost a certainty he didn't lose 40k, many will have renewed once he was on again.

And if 40k subscriptions lapse over 2 days that would seem to imply that he has 600k subscribers. He doesn't. The 40k loss is just sensationalist. He didn't log in the first of the month and probably had a ton of people re-sub on the 3rd when he was back on.

After a while, it all starts to sound like sports & business. Are you also a star on Youtube or Twitch? Or do you work in the industry?

I wonder if he thinks people who are making 3m+ a year after taxes can just disappear randomly and not have their income affected

Taking 48 hours off work is not “disappearing”, that’s a weekend. Perhaps the point is more how volatile the patronage is.

The article mentions that doing taking breaks causes a significant drop in their subscriber count.

If he set himself up with a consistent 48 hour no stream schedule, I doubt he would keep losing 40k subscribers every break

Live frugally, invest aggressively, retire in a few years.

Shouldn’t be too hard with such an absurd abundance of cash.

But he's at the very top. How much do you think the top software developer in the world makes? The problem with streaming is that once he gets off the hamster wheel for a bit there might be no wheel to climb back on later.

>The problem with streaming is that once he gets off the hamster wheel for a bit there might be no wheel to climb back on later.

Is that really a problem? He makes more in one year than most people make in their entire lifetime. Unless he's out there blowing his money on mansions and yachts (which I'm pretty sure he isn't), then he could stop at any time and retire comfortably. He doesn't need to get back on the hamster wheel.

But he's at the very top. Think about the tens of thousands of others that will have to deal with many of the same problems, but make a thousandth of what he makes. Nobody starts out streaming knowing they will be successful. Most people that became successful through streaming have been streaming for years for little return. The risk they took is ENORMOUS.

And this fits the stereotype of older generations, and indeed Americans in general, failing to read or do even superficial research. This guy streams his life to tens of thousands of people... yeah, he's gonna be a little self-obsessed. It's all but mandatory for streamers to fuel the performance.

The guy streams 70 hours per week minimum[1]. That two day -more like one day- break cost him over $100,000, and cut his following (and salary, I guess? No clue how Twitch works.) by almost 20%[2]. There's no option to pick more PTO and trade off salary. He's stuck with this. Even as a "temporary" solution, that shit will take years off your life, and there are people who do this to just scrape by.

It's illustrative of how shitty a "profession" it is that the top streamers have to put in such an insane amount of work with no compromise ever.

[1]: https://www.twitchmetrics.net/c/19571641-ninja [2]: https://kotaku.com/ninja-takes-two-day-break-loses-40-000-su...

Making $500k a month would allow you to save enough in a few years to jump off the hamster wheel and live completely off passive income. Not luxuriously, but better than most, and have all his time for his own.

To put some real numbers to this: $500k a month is $6M a year, or maybe $3M post-tax (assuming there's no way to shelter that income).

At a very conservative 3.33% annual withdrawal rate, which all but guarantees that your capital will grow faster than you spend it in the long term, after one year of work he could live on an annual income of $100k, forever, without working another day.

I guess it depends on your definition of "luxurious", but $100k free-and-clear annually buys you a much nicer lifestyle than most people have!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but any kind of stardom that nets you $3MM post-tax per year will also open the door to great investment opportunities AND a sort of residual income.

By residual income I mean things like being paid to appear at events and sponsor brands. Very low effort work. To be fair, that'll eventually dwindle away, but if he plays his chips right then he could coast on that kind of stuff for a long time.

Sure it would. But these things don't happen in a vacuum. If someone like Ninja just quit streaming one day, there would be a ton of pressure on him. His followers would constantly be asking him why he did it, when he's coming back. They'd speak rumors about him, comment publicly on his health (mental and physical).

I'm sure your answer is to just ignore it all. No problem, if you're a robot. Then there's the pressure that comes along with quitting a super-high income job. There's a voice in the back of your head saying "You are incredibly lucky to be here. Quitting is crazy. You'll never get a chance like this again."

This isn't a job that comes with a lot of security. If someone like Ninja left the scene for 1-2 years, there's no guarantees he'd ever be able to come back and have the same impact again. The odds are he couldn't.

Certainly this needs careful planning, like any big life changes.

there would be a ton of pressure on him. His followers would constantly be asking him why he did it, when he's coming back. They'd speak rumors about him, comment publicly on his health (mental and physical).

What pressure? Don’t want to feel pressure from thousands of anonymous people on Twitch? Don’t go on Twitch. Problem solved.

Similarly, know how to avoid all the negative social aspects of Twitter that so many celebs whine about? Don’t go on Twitter!

It’s the internet. It’s not real life. Why is this so hard?

This isn't some guy with a few thousand followers. He's literally a celebrity. He would need to delete all his publicly accessible social media, stop reading emails, and have the will-power not to go down the rabbit hole of reading the online discussion about him.

You act as if just disappearing as a celebrity is some easy job. Especially one in this area (Twitch), where the audience is more pervasive. There's plenty of celebrities out there who try to filter out criticism online but can't help themselves but get consumed by it. Kevin Durant is a great example. The guy has no reason to care about what some kids say about him on social media, but he still gets sucked into conversations about him online.

If you haven't been in the situation before, I think it's pretty unfair to just say "ignore it".

Being a celebrity doesn't mean you have to use Twitter/Twitch/Network-du-jour. You just don't do it.

Just like if you're a celebrity, you don't have to do drugs. Or drive fast. Or engage in any other self-destructive behavior.

This guy has a choice. He chooses to remain engaged even though he knows it's bad for him. If he's not able to choose otherwise, then it sounds like an addiction, or a mental illness.

If they care about some of their fans and their fans care about them, everyone should be understanding if they want to cut back on their hours to something sane. (And if not, they're not friends so who cares?)

Well that's my bad then, because I read 500k per year. So that's 4 million per year. Yeah, no right to complain then. Two years of that is nothing compared to 80 years of comfortable living. Still, the rest of what I said applies- this guy is obviously as far from representative as you can get, and for anyone outside the top 30-whatever streamers is having a much, much shittier time.

It's stressful and painful, and yet it's 500k a month of income. And we have sob story reference links as backup?

Then do the pain for one year and retire. How many people do you think would happily take that sacrifice? The degree of disconnect with average people by these millionaires is almost difficult to fathom.

Welcome to being self employed. When you run a business by yourself, every hour not worked is money lost. No PTO, no sick days, no breaks... you're always wondering how much money any given activity is costing you, from doing dishes and laundry to going to a bar with friends to whatever.

It's certainly not a millennial thing at all. 500k a month now could turn into little to nothing if he were to take a two week holiday and his fan base lost interest (conceivably).

It fits the stereotype of people making lousy generalizations about the generation-to-complain-about of the day.

I feel this way at first glance too. Then I remember that one could substitute Ninja for me, and his income for mine, and from the comparison of, say, a third-world trash-heap scavenger, I have similarly little reason to ever utter a peep of complaint about how my life is going. Yet I don't feel guilty saying negative things about my life or being depressed on occasion. And that helps me to feel sympathy for him.

>Yet I don't feel guilty saying negative things about my life or being depressed on occasion.

I do, especially after traveling. Holy shit do we have it good here.

I think you meant to say >> He makes 500k a month ... playing video games ...

Oddly enough it is more like addicts rather than millennials. The money is a dopamine hit, I've seen day traders with the same obsession trying to make their 'nut' every day. And getting so pumped when they do and so depressed when they don't. All while constantly complaining they would rather be doing anything else. It sounded like an addict saying they hated being an addict but they needed getting high to survive.

500K a month is 6 million a year. Lets say the taxes are 50% so you take two years to bank 6 million. It is pretty straight forward to live off six million dollars pretty much anywhere in the world. Even at 2% that is a monthly check of $10K. If you've got it in t-bills that is tax free.

But you don't get the dopamine hits from living off the interest.

Also similar to some online poker players I've known - even some of the lexicon is the same [e.g., 'grinding']

Would you say the same thing about the problems of famous "normal" celebrities, such as the high amount of drug overdose deaths?

These real life problems of famous individuals shows that fame and success isn't always all it is cracked up to be.

Related to Ninja in particular, I would also like to point out that Ninja's success is only recent. He has been doing the streamer grind for 10 whole years to get to this point of success in his life. And with a lot of luck along the way.

This fits into the stereotype of Millennials as entitled. He makes 500k a month, but can't get off the hamster wheel? Poor soul.

Hopefully one day he gets off that hamster wheel and has to dig ditches or clean toilets or roof a house in the desert for a living. Then he can know what work is.

My office window shows me a variety of people who work a thousand times harder than I do coding. And each day I am grateful that I don’t have to do their tasks.

Have you ever had golden handcuffs?

While I'm sure starvation, lack of shelter, unemployment etc. are certainly in a different league, I can empathize with someone who feels trapped due to their compensation.

My story isn't as intense, but after an acquisition I had a really hard time. My career growth was frozen and I wanted to leave but I felt that leaving money on the table was doing a great diservice to my wife and children. It was much rougher than I had imagined.

That's not to say someone deserves pity for having to choose between a massive income and "getting off the hamster wheel", but I for one don't blame him for feeling trapped.

We call that "shit you say when you're full" in Korea. It may be subjectively stressful, but don't expect much sympathy from people who objectively have it 100x worse than you do.

> This fits into the stereotype of Millennials as entitled. He makes 500k a month, but can't get off the hamster wheel? Poor soul.

That's why we have this new term, 'golden handcuffs', which has never been applied to anyone born before 1995.

Stay strong, the Tech Lead, if you are out there.

Are you talking about youtube channel thetechlead?

"most fun job"? There are many reasons why I don't work as a YouTuber. And I do not wanna be a "star"

I'm sure there are tons of people who would say the same thing about whatever it is you do. Different strokes for different folks.

Exactly but i don't say: "Software engineering is the most fun job".

If they feel burnout then they should just stop making videos for awhile or move on to doing something else.

> stop making videos for awhile

It has a huge detrimental effect. Each day you take a break can set you back by several. From the article:

>> “I left for less than 48 hours and lost 40,000 subscribers on Twitch. I’ll be back today… grinding again.”

> move on to doing something else

There's not a clear career path to anything else. Many of them have spent their formative adult years streaming, and transitioning to another career would be incredibly difficult and likely pay significantly less.

Sure, there are the mega-streamers who have (hopefully) saved enough money that they could absorb that gigantic setback, or have enough celebrity that they can transition to something else, but I doubt the majority of them have earned enough to support a major life transition - like, say, going back to school full-time.

This is also one of the problems former professional athletes face, and there are actually a lot of interesting parallels between the two groups. "Broke" is a really interesting watch if you haven't seen it already that is quite eye-opening: http://www.espn.com/30for30/film?page=broke

Umm yeah, I still think they should move on. If you hate doing something then why continue doing it? Best to shift into an occupation you enjoy. I don't really think youtube or twitch were even meant to be full-time occupations to begin with.

> If you hate doing something then why continue doing it? Best to shift into an occupation you enjoy

This describes, likely, a large portion of the workforce in general and isn't specific to streamers.

The answer, of course, is that it pays the bills and it's really hard to:

1) Figure out what it is that you'd actually enjoy

2) Figure out how to make money doing that

> There's not a clear career path to anything else

If you’re making $6 million / year, you have the resources with which to take time off and reconsider your choices.

It's a shame that that is the quote they decided to use in the article. But you can ask any Twitch streamer, if you take a vacation expect to lose large amounts of your subscribers.

On YouTube, if you stop posting videos for a while, YouTube will severely punish you in the algorithm. It'll take weeks before your videos start showing back up in user's subscription boxes.

> if you take a vacation expect to lose large amounts of your subscribers

And if a freelancer takes a vacation, they can expect to lose contract volumes. This is why people form teams, so one person can take a break while other people pick up the slack. If you're making a lot of money, you should be able to take the hit and re-organise in a more sustainable way.

> If you’re making $6 million / year, you have the resources with which to take time off and reconsider your choices.

> > Sure, there are the mega-streamers who have (hopefully) saved enough money that they could absorb that gigantic setback, or have enough celebrity that they can transition to something else, but I doubt the majority of them have earned enough to support a major life transition - like, say, going back to school full-time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com