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Comment by throwawawathrow | Hacker News Reader

People are already making content without monetizing it, and have been for decades. As alien a way of thinking as it may seem to some, many human beings do not need a bizarre system of 'market-based incentives' to get anything done at all. They just do it, out of passion, boredom, to learn, or to share with friends. Are you seriously implying the 'young kid starting out' has Youtube monetization all setup in order, or has sponsors knocking on their door?

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Your posts actually seem like the sort of perversion that ads have inflicted on our relationship with content and how they've trained us to value content at $0.

I don't really understand how waiting around and hoping for someone to make something out of hobby or charity is a reasonable stance when content brings me a non-zero amount of value and entertainment, when I can pay for it and get better results. Life is too short to sit and pray that someone else will feel like doing something for free that will happen to benefit me.

The idea seems a bit juvenile. Or as if we're all such simpletons that anything will please us all the same, it doesn't matter, so just wait for the next free shit.

I don't even understand how this idea survives concrete examples. If I happen to enjoy someone's free hobby content, then I directly benefit from their ability to make a living producing that content.

> Your posts actually seem like the sort of perversion that ads have inflicted on our relationship with content and how they've trained us to value content at $0.

Bingo. He's unwittingly the poster child for the devaluation of human capital.

>I don't even understand how this idea survives concrete examples.

Lol you don't understand how knowledge can be shared between two or more parties without one of them making a profit? Am I reading this right?

I think the concept you're missing is called a "gift economy". It's actually more fundamental to humans than the market economy, it underpins society, and it lets the market economy exist in the first place.

> when I can pay for it and get better results

That's called "commissioning a work of art". Or, iterated, can be turned into patronage. Unlike advertising, this is a honest and correct way of rewarding creation of art using market means.

What percentage of HN users do you think are posting because they are paid to do so?

This seems like a relatively high quality site compared to the rest of the internet.

People will make content as a hobby, but you won't see people doing it on the level (frequency or quality) they have been today. Internet likes and shares are nice but if they won't pay the bills, and a lot of creators will prioritize their time accordingly.

I have a hard time believing that someone on HN, a crowd whose primary job involves using free software and whose primary hobby is reading Wikipedia articles, would just idly speculate about things against the most blatant contrary evidence.

But then, this being HN, this sort of speculation is to be expected, heh.

Wikipedia is a great example. They have to go begging the world every few months to keep the greatest website in the world operating. HN (and dang's job) is funded by the excess of YCombinator, and the rest of us just show up to chat whenever.

But both of these sites show that:

1) Extraordinary value can indeed be created for free, simply because people want to contribute something. You'll note that all the money pays for in both cases is hosting.

2) Both sites can exist without involving the advertising industry and all its corruption.

I don't remember many young video creators before Youtube.

You know what Youtube runs on, right? It's not just the creators who get money from ads.

Young video creators have been around but not at this scale because youtube or instagram props them up and makes them influencers. They have no life experience and yet are influencing millions of other young people. The sad part is that everything is shocking content to get their visitors up. This is broken imo and can’t lead to anything good. Of course, few of them become millionares

No platform, no audience(+). No audience, no creators(+).

(+) In general.

Youtube itself had lots of young creators before they started the monetizing game and they were creating content for free and a lot of it was good, honest and creative. Along with the monetization and aggressive promotion everything went into a shocking craze to increase the number of followers, the number of views and the volume of content. A lot of it is just crap.

Sure, but the question is whether Youtube as a platform could survive without the ad income.

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