YouTube burnout is real. Creators are struggling to cope | Hacker News Reader

YouTube burnout is real. Creators are struggling to cope

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14 pointsrubinelli9 comments

So what? most of us are "under pressure" to go to work every day, earn a fraction of what these people make, and sometimes we need a break and feel burned out. I don't understand why I should feel sorry for millionaires "working so much, they have more money than they can spend". Then work less..

for some at the very top I don't understand just go do something else. But, part of the problem is the algorithms won't let you just slow down. There's an exponential drop in popularity.

Ok but then again, if it's earning millions, you probably need to hire a profi team – Letterman ran the show every day for 30 years...

Most YouTubers don't earn much.

For the Youtubers who don't earn much, I completely sympathize. For those who do earn a lot... I don't really sympathize too much. A quote in the article says "I had more money than I could spend -- and I was super depressed. I had to quit everything and take a break for two years.". GOOD - they hit burnout and did what was needed -- take a break. It was only that they had "more money than I could spend" that they could afford to take a break. I don't sympathize with the ones who can afford to take time off and don't; I do sympathize with the majority who don't earn enough to take a break or slow down.

I am inclined to agree with this. There are plenty of people burnt out.

What's the alternative? Make things easier? Pay them more so they can take longer off? Get youtube to present older videos to people so the creators don't have too much of a revenue dip while they take a week off?

There are plenty of self employed people. It's no one else's fault if you get burnt out.

I’m struggling to sympathize. The most popular creators (using the word loosely here) earn millions. They have an option to hire a production team, work less or simply go do something different. The model used to gain popularity - high frequency of new content produced with minimal resources - doesn’t scale against the expectations they themselves set with their audiences. And the algorithm just perpetuates it.

YouTubers are put under an extreme amount of stress from consumers in order to constantly be creating new and different content for its audience. I am glad there is starting to be a discussion surrounding this.

The only way to fix the crux of the YouTube "problem" is to force Google to disclose how their subscription and recommendation algorithms work. The reaction from YouTube top brass to previous demands of transparency have been to treat the AI as some sort of deity instead of a computer program. In the USA, I'm afraid it will take a constitutional amendment to fix this.

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