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Comment by computator | Hacker News Reader

I say with sadness that the Internet has nearly killed the prospect of making a living as an author, and no amount of passionate speech is going to change that fact.

No one should go into any of the following professions with any expectation of making money:

1) Writing of any kind (fiction, non-fiction, technical articles, journalism -- forget about it)

2) Digital art of any kind (see DeviantArt for millions of super-talented creations that haven't earned a cent)

3) Photography of any kind (see Shutterfly for millions of photos better than anything you ever took and yet no one will ever pay for)

4) Composing music or lyrics

It rather surprises me that software, a creative and digital medium like the above, is not futile and that you can still make a good living at it.

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There have always been many writers, artists, composers who make little or no money doing what they do. The internet has just made it more apparent that these people exist. If anything, it has given these people more opportunities to get discovered and eventually be able to make a living. As an anecdote I have a few friends (used to work in the fashion industry) whose photography got picked by big brands and now make quite a tidy sum in advertising. They would probably never have been discovered if it wasn't for the internet because they were just doing it as a hobby.

> I say with sadness that the Internet has nearly killed the prospect of making a living as an author, and no amount of passionate speech is going to change that fact.

As far as I know not only are there more authors than ever, but more authors making a living than ever. What the Internet killed isn't being an author, but the exclusivity of being an author, which is a good thing for the majority of people.

The problem is that the egalitarian nature of the Internet (at least in the sense of barrier to entry) doesn't extend to society. When you might spend a significant part of your working life paying for housing, most other things are relatively unimportant for ones prospect of doing other things.

> It rather surprises me that software, a creative and digital medium like the above, is not futile and that you can still make a good living at it.

It is to some extent. But there is enough people entering the field for it to not be that noticeable.

Photography is alive and well as a service rather than a thing. The days of buying a print are gone (or will be soon) but tons of people make a living doing portraits, weddings, events, headshots, etc.

It’s a different model, but I suspect more money is made because taking pictures is hard. The pictures are free (ie, included) but it costs a lot to hire a photographer.

That’s how software lives as a profession.

It is alive, but certainly not well. There are fewer making a living doing it and among those who are, most earn far less than they used to.

Source: my wife is a photographer and consequently I follow photographers more than I'd otherwise.

Funny my wife is a photographer too and I follow lots of photogs and see growth over the past year.

BLS [0] is forecasting -6% drop from 2016 to 2016, but 12% growth in self employed photographers.

So yeah, it’s not doing so well in general. But it’s gangbusters in her segment (all digital experience photography)

[0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/mobile/photo...

Not at all true and easily falsifiable by looking at top YouTubers, Instagrammers, Patreons, self-published authors, etc.

It's a power law thing — a small number of creators can make a living, a slightly larger number can make _some_ money but will still need a day job, and then there's a huge long tail of people who make nothing from their art.

It's true that "the Internet has nearly killed the prospect of making a living as an author". But maybe there are other ways to reward authors.

My first career was doing academic science. As a grad student and postdoc, grants paid my salary. As a professor, universities mostly did. I never earned anything from stuff that I published. Indeed, I had to pay to have it published.

But of course, it was publications that kept me employed. And got me grants.

I don't know what that would look like for authors. But without an alternative, the publishing industry will demand police-state level DRM, and that would be horrible.

I can't say I agree with the first two. You can make money, good money in fact, as a romance self-published author. You can also make excellent money as a digital artist drawing for niche audiences (furries are well known for dropping a ton of money on 'fursona' stuff). Patreon remains alive and well, also.

You are confusing "art" for the purpose of "art" with work done for the purpose of something to be done.

In particular, you believe it is possible to make a living writing software. Yes, indeed can be, as long as you write exactly the bespoke software your customer demands. If you would expect to be paid by someone to create software in general, there is no way. The internet is full of free software which can be compared to stock photos for photographers.

Yeah, making a living writing software in a creative sense was never even possible, since software was free to begin with. It was always an equivalent of being hired to write pr articles, make banners, logos, take wedding photos, etc.

there is far more money being made off of all of the forms of art you mention than ever before in history. there are more books being published, more photos taken, etc, etc.

it was never easy to make money off of writing before. it still isn't. given than many more people are doing it the proportion of failures to successes is higher and the earnings are more widely dispersed.

people don't usually make money off of software directly but usually by using software to enable some sort of process that they can charge for.

software engineers make money the same way ghost writers, or script writers, or other real writing professionals make money. they get a spec and they implement it. the difference between professionals and artists is that professionals get paid up front.

Internet may have killed the prospect of making a living as an author "the traditional way", but it allows other ways. Many artists makes a living out of Patreon. According to them [1], there are people that made $150k+ in a year authoring videos or podcasts. You can find people making a living writing fiction [2], producing music or photography.

[1] https://blog.patreon.com/top-earners-2016 [2] https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators

> I say with sadness that the Internet has nearly killed the prospect of making a living as an author, and no amount of passionate speech is going to change that fact. ...

You know that crowdfunding is a thing, right? If you're good at what you do, and choose a business model that's actually in line with the work you're doing, you don't NEED to care about piracy. You can fully monetize your work in a very consumer-friendly way, whwre the more people pirate it, the better!

The one creative medium that probably won't work well with crowdfunding models is live-action movies and AAA games. But that has more to do with just how incredibly costly these are to produce in the first place - it's really no surprise that people would balk at funding that kind of money, even in a distributed, "grassroots" way!

>> It rather surprises me that software, a creative and digital medium like the above, is not futile and that you can still make a good living at it.

Anyone can write a story, create a drawing, or take a picture. It may be a bad story, a crude drawing, or a poor picture, but they can be done. However...software cannot be made by an novice. You can't wing it, have beginners luck, or stumble through it. No amount of "can do attitude" will make your code compile. Hence, you can still make a good living at it. If writing software was easy, everyone would be doing it.

That's some peak HN nonsense right there.

Anyone can write code that compiles and does what they want with a bit of "can do attitude". Not everyone can write decent code that is maintainable.

This has always been the promise of e.g. PHP. There's been a ton of people who were complete novices, whose first lines of code were a .php file that they uploaded over FTP to some shared hosting.

What I will grant is that a novice is going to be completely lost if they try to start with a "modern" app. There's way too many moving parts. When webpack (implicitly included in e.g. create-react-app) fails to build because something's wrong in an implicit dependency, a novice is going to be totally screwed.

I think that is more of a fault with "modern" apps than it is with web developing in general, ie, dependency hell with arcane libraries doing god knows what for god knows what reason. If you simplify, then anyone and their grandma can write a basic html page with some tutorials and google-fu.

I am not sure... browsing Patreon, I see that many artists earn a lot of money for say, digital art.

Software used to be rife with piracy too, until the problem was solved by SaaS.

That's because there's still a huge market for bespoke software that serves a particular need.

There's a nontrivial market for bespoke art and music too, so if artists and musicians need a steady income, they have those options.

You're right, though, the scene sucks. Computers and the internet have destroyed the incentive for creativity. Absent a total Butlerian jihad scale ban on computers, the best solution I can think of is standardized, strong DRM at the hardware level implemented by a consortium of OEMs and backed up with force of law DMCA style.

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