YouTube Created a Generation of Young Stars. Now They Are Getting Burned Out
wsj.com
wsj.com
> PewDiePie, who was the first individual creator to hit 100 million subscribers, said in a video that he was taking a break
On the one hand, it's amazing that one person can produce a show which reaches what previously you'd have needed a multinational TV organisation for. On the other hand, doing it alone makes it a lonely business with a higher risk of drifting off in a bad direction with nobody to correct you.
> YouTubers say they are afraid to take time off, out of fear it will hurt how their videos are highlighted on the site, which uses an algorithm to determine which ones to recommend. While the algorithm is a mystery
This is why so much of the "is youtube good or bad" question is misled by looking inside the videos. The really important action of youtube, the thing which prevents people leaving it, is (a) the recommendation and (b) the funding .. both of which are completely opaque to those whose careers depend on them. They're left with chaining themselves to a video camera to appease their machine god.
It's not just the notification system to existing subscribers as the recommendation - free advertising - to people who are not already subscribers. And PDP gets a huge benefit from this advertising.
Which is unfortunately anyone and everyone on YouTube
Setup your email server following absolutely every best practice, even the most optional ones, then try to mail yourself on gmail. Then mark it as not spam. Then keep trying and you will figure out it already happened.
I struggled yesterday to copy a work appointment from my Gmail Calendar in the web browser to my personal Calendar in Calendar.app on my Mac.
No option in Google Calendar to export the calendar event as an ICS at all. Google Calendar events also don’t seem to contain ICS files either. I think CalDAV and ICS are now niche enough that Google feels it can afford to neglect these.
So long as email has big competitors like Microsoft’s O365 Google can’t make a play to break email standards but if O365 declines in usage I bet Google will try to sow up the email market.
> You're basically giving people a playbook for how to game your system.
You aren't wrong, but accepting secrecy for this reason is a flawed premise. As it assumes that giving YouTube arbitrary and oversight free power over what people view and what it's creators make is better than trying to prevent an open rule set from being gamed.
We learned this was a bad idea in government, food, construction, vehicle safety, etc a long long time ago. Software is just overdue for it's own set of transparency rules.
Those are 2 separate and independent things.
Regardless, they are not controlling what creators make or view. Creators can make whatever they want and users can choose to watch whatever they want. YouTube also explicitly says when a video is recommended. Also note that this Youtube's platform.
Comparing this to the other things you list is also not a great comparison. It's quite a reach actually. For instance, not knowing what was in food is different than not knowing the formula.
Are you claiming recommendations do not affect views and views do not affect what content people create? This is obviously false.
> For instance, not knowing what was in food is different than not knowing the formula.
This is a great comparison actually, we all consume Youtube's recommendations without knowing either what was taken into account (the contents) or the exact weights of these things (the formula).
That won't stop other actors from monitoring recommendations / search results and observing how they change. With a bit of ML they could train a model on that data and obtain all the answers they want. The information is hard to observe up close but easy to extract when you collect lots of observations.
Recommendations for people I subscribe to are great, but don't need much magic.
Recommendations for creators I've liked or viewed many videos of before are generally good.
Recommendations for videos with tags that I tend to like are hit and miss.
Other recommendations are usually low quality garbage, in my experience.
I suspect their recommendation algorithm is overly complicated because it optimizes for ad revenue rather than value to viewer. I think a simple algorithm weighting viewer->creator score and creator->other creator score could produce higher quality recommendations than their current system. Maybe add a dash of keyword to the final sort to allow videos on the same topics to be grouped together.
PewDiePie has tens of millions of dollars for vlogging and here you are making him sound like a peasant locked in serfdom.
For every uplifting dishwasher-turned-billionaire story, there are millions of dishwashers who will never share that fate.
My dad makes holiday videos and various guitar repair / upgrade videos, he doesn't earn enough to live off of but it's bought him all of the guitars he's ever dreamed of owning.
I'm also related to Steejo and Suzy Lu who both make their living from game video streaming. They work harder than most people but they also have a degree of autonomy that most people would envy.
Just like the brain doesn't need every neuron broadcasting its state to every other neuron.
That's the fundamental flaw of Social Media and Media in general - Many to Many Broadcast - is not as useful to society as thought.
And we are learning it at high cost.
Feels like you're just trying to make a political comment here.
Do you have a list of Youtubers who were unjustly "cancelled"? The way you phrase it "sometimes justified... but not always" makes it sound like you're familiar with unfairly "cancelled" youtubers, so I'm curious.
If it were just one youtuber who was unjustly cancelled you wouldn't have written "some cases, justified" which implicitly means "most cases, unjustified" so I'd really love to see evidence that your implicit claim that most cases are unjustified isn't just a cheap political jab
I do, however, feel the risks are higher in YouTube because what you say is more subject to public scrutiny. Your colleagues aren't going to advocate for your removal at work for what you say outside of work hours around your friends in a social setting. But when you're a public figure, or representing brands in videos, even those little moments become subject to criticism. YouTube stars' lives blend professional and personal spheres in ways that ordinary careers do not.
To be frank, this is exactly what I thought, and really calls into question why you would make such a biased and baseless comment.
Your criticism appears to have nothing to do with youtube at all, and is a general criticism of public life and how being a public figure opens you up to greater scrutiny both from the platforms you use publicly as well as the audiences you reach. Which, while true, is a truism that is far older than the internet... or electricity... or democracy...
Why do you need me to name a person impacted by cancel culture? The discussion shouldn't latch onto one person's particular situation. I have enough empathy in me to believe that some people impacted by cancel culture regret their actions, and are given no opportunity to make amends, and I think that's toxic and it encourages people to be further more toxic, because they're given no other option than to double down. Cancel culture is a very new phenomena and is not as old as electricity or democracy.
Because you lied to push a biased and false political narrative, and when challenged, you admitted it. I wanted you to substantiate your beliefs because I knew you had fallen for bad propaganda, and I hoped that by demanding evidence, you would re-evaluate your biased position, realize it was not founded on reality or evidence, and grow as a person. I hoped in some small way to cure this propaganda infection, and inoculate you against future attacks on your concept of reality. Obviously, that failed.
P.S. if you think everyone in the public is millionaires only, you live an extremely ignorant or privileged life. Almost none of the politicians, news reporters, actors on television, athletes are millionaires. It's very rare to be a millionaire and only the top of the top are. The vast majority of everyone you see on television or read on the internet are not a millionaires.
If you think Youtube is a grinder, check out College Football and the NFL. See how many kids give their bodies, their health, their lives and only 1/1000 even make it, and of that number, generally only 1/100 will sign a major million+ contract.
Want another example? Check out YCombinator, the culture of over-work, hackers, start-ups, entrepreneurs, where young folks are killing themselves to find a billionaire to fund them. Almost none of them will succeed, but they're motivated by the image of a tiny number of rare successes.
The world is full of young people giving 150% effort for paltry returns on their time investment all to enrich entrenched oligarchs/oligopolies. Youtube isn't the worst, it isn't an outlier, and there are far more important and dangerous systems than youtube.
Toby Turner had rape allegations made against him which were later taken back. It's hard to say where his channel would be had that not happened, but the timing makes it seem like it was a major factor in its decline.
1. They record a video of something on their phones and upload it to share with their friends. Practically every human with a smartphone does this at some point.
2. Maybe they enjoyed that and the feedback they got from their friends, so they make it public and maybe upload a few more. They start thinking about sharing videos to an audience bigger than the people they personally know. This is a completely natural transition because most people on Earth are frequently watching YouTube videos that were shared just like that.
3. Now it starts to feel like the video itself is the goal and not the experience they were having that they happened to film. Instead of "we were doing X and recorded it" it's "I'm making a video of X". They make more little videos and upload them. They enjoy seeing their production skills improve, and it feels good to make things. Their friends think they're funny and it feels really nice getting a positive comment or thumbs up on the video. They are getting zero money. It's entirely about intrinsic reward.
4. Some small fraction of the people who reach 3 stick with it enough and have the right personality/video skills/topic/whatever to get a bit of traction. Now they're making a tiny amount of money and being a "YouTuber" starts to feel like more of who they are. They start to wonder how far they can take this.
5. Now that some trickle of money is coming it, they naturally start thinking about investing in what they do. It makes sense to maybe get a better camera, or buy Final Cut Pro. They start putting real time into this, at the expense of other hobbies and activities.
6. At this point, being a YouTuber starts to involve actual trade-offs. They're putting enough time and money into it that they are sacrificing other opportunities. Raising their production value and keeping up with posting frequency means they need to make videos even when they don't feel like it. They start doing the calculation of whether it's worth it.
7. Those who decide it is worth it now need to start taking it more seriously. The sacrifices they are making are clear and fixed, but the rewards (popularity and money) are less predictable. Now they are at the point you mention where they start really caring about optimizing for YouTube's opaque algorithm. Those who do it well may actually be able to make a living, but it always feels tenuous and uncertain. Staking your income on the combination of popularity contest/machine learning algorithm/ad platform is pretty sketchy. But for some it actually works. And, at this point, you're in pretty far, already have a lot of experience and time put in, so it makes sense to see how far you can ride it.
In the case of YouTubers, if you already have thousands of followers, video gear, lighting, hard-earned performance skills, and video editing proficiency, then it is entirely rational to try to continue to leverage those investments for your future income.
I've got two decades of experience in software engineering. It's not a sunk cost fallacy for me to continue looking for software engineering jobs, it's me trying to capitalize on that investment.
The real hard part is figuring out when some past investment like that is winding down such that you're better off discarding your potential future earning from it order to spend that time building up a new investment. You don't wait until the copper mine is completely empty to shut it down. You close it when the copper you can extract is worth less than you could get from spending that time elsewhere. Making that calculation for our intangible skill investments is really difficult.
The entertainment industry itself reinforced this with stories where the "winners" were those who never stopped trying to make it big, no matter what their parents said or how broke they got (much to my chagrin as my dad tried to explain why it was never gonna happen).
The performing arts really are a notoriously difficult way to make a living and kid-me didn't realize that for every Mick Jagger, Michael Jordan, and Michael J. Fox who "never gave up the dream" there were millions of Mike and Michelle Smiths who spent an inordinate amount of their lives chasing that winning ticket but never pulling the right numbers.
Thankfully, I also found that you can still pursue music, athletics, acting, or whatever else you enjoy as a hobby or side gig and still have a hell of a lot of fun (and probably end up a more well-rounded person).
YouTube is larger than many previous TV organizations, with none of the benefits of working for them
This isn't burning out, it's having a holiday.
This has two consequences:
1. It sucks to be a producer for the platform.
2. The audience is pushed towards endless junk content instead of quality because that’s what the algorithm favors and incentivized producers to put into the world.
It did not have to be this way. It still doesn’t. The algorithm is an intentional decision to favor one style of content and production over others.
This is just a reflection of what humans want. It's how people want their entertainment, their food, their news, their clothes, etc. I respect people who try to legitimately deliver a quality product, but it's an uphill battle.
Youtube is a business, and as part of Google it has to make money to justify its existence. The algorithm is representative of the promotions Google thinks will maximize views of monetized content which will drive revenue.
Unfortunately as in many other areas, quality of content does not necessarily correlate to that content producing the most revenue, so Google is aiming for the sweet spot in the bell curve, which means whatever has the most appeal to the most people... the lowest common denominator.
It's certainly true that "people will like this" is a factor in the recommendations, but that seems... correct? It would be pretty silly if Youtube kept pushing indie films people don't want to watch at them.
Honestly, Youtube has become my video platform of choice precisely because I have no interest in that kind of content. While I am sure you do great work, the algorithm would be broken if you were recommended to me. I find the algorithm has done a great job of highlighting high quality channels that are up my ally. It sounds you would really be better off on a service more like Netflix, where the audience is looking for that kind of filmmaking.
Frankly, Netflix is going in the direction of YouTube too. They've lost most of their back catalog of films and are replacing it with mass-produced TV shows designed for binge consumption.
There's a vast amount of high quality content on YouTube. What is not present are high production values. But that's fine really. In the end, production values are not important, it's the story you have to tell that matters.
Should the government require that Google search, Facebook and YouTube recommendation algorithms be published? And should changes to those algorithms need to meet certain criteria at by regulators, in order to prevent ill effects on society?
I'm thinking there must come a time when our machine algorithms are so impactful in society that we can't afford to leave them in the stewardship of a single private company with only profit motives. I think we probably reached this point a while ago.
Disclaimer: this is just my understanding of how these newsfeed type algorithms work based on conversations with friends who work on these teams at FB/GOOG. Please do correct me if I got something wrong here.
Many folks often wish that ranking/recommendation algorithms like PageRank search engine, or Youtube "watch next", or email spam heuristics, etc, be revealed to the public. E.g. the exact algorithm is required by law to be published on Github.
That would hurt society more than help because once the algorithms are public, the code's inner workings can then be gamed and abused.
That's the paradox or contradiction: for the algorithms to be effective, they have to be kept a secret to prevent gaming.
Recommendation/ranking algorithms are not to be confused with "security by obscurity" memes. Yes, you can publish the exact algorithm to derive a SHA-256 but that's not the same domain as a ranking algorithm. For Google to transition the algorithms from basic PageRank to Panda to Penguin to Hummingbird, etc ... the inner workings must be kept secret to be effective.
I know it drives people crazy that the algorithms are secret but you can't make them public in a way that stops abusers from using that knowledge against us.
As the game of cat and mouse goes on it would result in us refining our algorithms to the point where they actually measure what we want rather than an approximation of what we want. Eventually "gaming the algorithms" would be the same as producing high quality content. Yes refining algorithms to that point would be hard work but it would get figured out.
As far as I know, nobody in computer science has come up with a ranking algorithm that can't be gamed to render the algorithm useless. (Unless the so-called algorithm is a trivial case such as the runner with the fastest time across the finish line is the "winner" of the race.) For a multi-criteria algorithm that approximates a hazy idea like "video quality" that uses various signals as proxies for quality, the algorithm's exact source code must be kept a secret. Yes, you can publicize broad outlines of what the algorithm does but you can't reveal the actual code (or the actual machine learning weights, etc).
Yes, an algorithm like a SHA256 hash source code can be made transparently public and still can't be "abused" such that a bad actor can make the string "DEADBEEF" appear anywhere they want in the output hash. This class of algorithm behaves differently than ranking/recommendation algorithms.
So I don't buy that argument off hand.
Plus people are already gaming the system, it's just the knowledge to do so is imperfect and unfairly distributed. Leveling the playing field there puts more focus on making the algorithm less vulnerable in the first place instead of effectively relying on security through obscurity.
This happens without it being public knowledge and is commonly referred to as SEO. Keeping the black box a block box hurts more than helps because the privileged few that do have it figured out completely control the narrative. In addition a publicly published algo helps re-introduce competition. I see it as no different than food products being required to list ingredients.
I'm not claiming that absolutely zero gaming is possible. For all the successes that the SEO industry achieves, it's still a version of the proverbial blind men (SEO experts) feeling different parts of a giant elephant (the opaque Google algorithm). That's why SEO practitioners still get blindsided by new search engine changes by Google.
What level of algorithmic transparency can one achieve without sacrificing gaming?
I ask this question because this is a common discussion for many aspects in our society. For example, we have designed laws over 100s of years despite the knowledge that they can be prone to gaming. The existence of gaming itself is not a good enough reason to have ZERO algorithmic transparency.
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
That's an important consideration, but I don't think it is known to be inevitable.
It seems like a worthy research goal, to develop algorithms which are not gameable (in defined ways) despite knowing the algorithms.
Consider how publishing good encryption algorithms does not render the encryption breakable.
And the research being done now on Differential Privacy techniques, to allow large scale data collection from individuals without compromising individual privacy.
I suspect there is an analogous class of algorithms that resist being gamed in ways that matter. Possibly requiring that the deployed algorithm depend on a secret key or random seed, but that would be fine as long as the secret does not encode another algorithm.
Companies are the LEAST dependable ones to create truly uncorrupt algorithms for social media. They adjust everything to drive sales, to drive profit, to drive ad revenue, because year over year shareholders expect profit growth.
Creating social media presence used to be fair, but now as a content creator, the ONLY way to get noticed is to game the system. Rich people and companies prevail against algorithms because they can hire companies to boost their views, and to create followers, and to create massive campaigns.
This makes everything unfair, and invalidates the equality that the Internet was meant to create.
There is already a universal basis for social media timelines and algorithms, it's the one they started out with when they were trying to become important; A time line based on when content was posted, equal visibility for all users, conservative ad placement without pop-ups, User Interfaces based on functionality first, thorough testing of releases prior to updates, reading feedback from users before addressing stakeholder concerns... And most importantly "Not Becoming Evil" in the process.
But the algorithms are already being "gamed and abused" - that's why Google keeps changing them - so in the worst case revealing the algorithms is no different than our current situation.
The advantage of opening the algorithms is that everybody can see and understand how the algorithms might be gamed, so they can look out for sites and other actors gaming them.
Keeping the algorithms secret is a way for them to play stupid and shirk responsibility, and lets them do their own shady things without oversight.
We have a bunch of companies that run A/B tests all the time, and of course either A or B result in more time spent watching or less subscriber cancellations. So then they keep that change. Hence you get a product that over time is literally designed to be as addicting as possible...that can't be a net positive for society in my mind.
An interesting idea I have (not realistic of course) is that companies would have to "send their customers away." Like the mountain lion in that Trailer Park Boys episode where "if you love something you have to set it free," a positive way to service your customers is to help them get done with what they want to do as fast as possible.
"But my customers want to be entertained for X hours." Okay, provide a UI for them to find stuff to watch but do not autoplay videos (for example).
There's not "an algorithm" that can be published and inspected, like good ol' Pagerank. It's probably more accurate to think of it like thousands of slightly different algorithms knotted together, tied to an enormous database that selects with algorithm gets used for which person at which point in time. The knot and the database are constantly changing.
You could perhaps publish the machine learning algorithms that created the recommendation engine, but those won't tell you anything useful without the training data (which, for these systems, is absolutely huge and complex).
I'm convinced that a big reason these social platforms haven't fixed their recommendation engines is that they actually have no idea why they recommend the things they do.
The systems are trained on "engagement", without regard to whether it's good or bad, happy or sad, constructive or destructive. It's just: which thing collects the most clicks from which people.
In a way, this makes these recommendation engines mirrors into human nature--which sounds cool, but is actually boring and banal. We already knew that it is easier to make someone unhappy than to make them happy. And we typically want people to build things that deliver happiness--even though we know it's harder.
But using ML for controlling content? Please. I very much doubt anything like that is going to happen.
The publishing industry is kind of terrible, and the line between real journalism and critique died somewhere around 2008. If I were to pick a point, I'd look to when Jeff was fired by CNET after he gave Kane and Lynch an unfavorable review. But you can see it in the degradation of every major gaming news outlet that used to have full-time employees with a platform stable enough to not bow down to PR teams.
That type of blowback would never happen today because any journalistic wall between the PR folks pushing these products and the content creators no longer exists. YouTube has successfully weaponized content. We like to talk a lot today about how great it is that we don't see ads. That's kind of lie. They are certainly there and we see them everyday, it's just now embedded in the content itself. The journos can't compete, because the PR firms block access to coverage unless the story is preconceived. As an example, back in the day we used to boycott Call of Duty "review" events where they'd fly you in a helicopter at a hotel so you could play the game for 6 hours with someone over your shoulder.
Fandom and "fun" content creation was always a loose proposition ("will i still be doing this at 40" was the bar night saying), but now it's just a quick hit slog. I sympathize with these folks to a degree. They're all independent, they all have no idea if this will be a job even next year, so of course they will take on any sort of shilling to keep their dream going. They need to hustle. It's like running a one-person startup.
I'm more worried about the 10s of thousands of other sad bedrooms where this is pushed as a real industry and a way of life. When startups fail, we engineers and designers fall back to jobs with the skills we learned. It's not as easy for people whose skill was trying to be funny on camera. There's a lot of people chasing the dream at the moment, and of course that's no different than trying to be a movie star, but part of me winces when I open up twitch and see that all this awkwardness is so public and often permanent.
If anyone is curious about where some of this could go, I'd recommend reading Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, a sort of near-future fiction that got a lot of this stuff right before it happened. I consider it the Network (as in the 70s movie) of our age. I fear for the day when the influencers and streamers make their way out of their bedrooms and into our public spaces, and we'll all be part of the show.
I read a lot of complaints about Instagram influencers at Burning Man and how people (men) are trying to sabotage their video shoots by wandering behind the shot with no pants on.
Someone was wondering if poopers in front of new condo developments was neighborly gratis or a new subversive campaign.
For real though, I don't have much to add to what you're saying here, but I did want to say "thank you" for your work; I literally can't guess at the hours of enjoyment I've gotten over the years from Gamespot/GB. And, personally, I've always low-key had an eye on the games and games journalism space and Gamespot/Giant Bomb being what they were and are, while the space changed around it...hit home that while I might've wanted to do what Giant Bomb does, I wouldn't want to do what everybody else does.
I think your analysis is pretty spot-on about the constant shilling; I know a couple creators whose endorsements shouldn't mean squat given what they knew about the products when they endorsed it, I don't even mean the NordVPN stuff. But they need to figure out some way, any way, to actually make money off of this stuff. Patreon is a sorta-answer, but Patreon are kinda pricks and they own your patrons instead of you owning your patrons, so you're stuck there, too. Good times.
I don't know what the next step forward is. Floatplane is interesting...but Floatplane wants to use YouTube as the minor leagues to pull creators, and I genuinely don't know if there's enough organic lead generation to do that in a sustainable way that doesn't just privilege existing voices. I have no idea what comes next there. I've been writing a "Wordpress for podcast networks" web app as of late ('cause Wordpress is not great for podcasts, though people use it) to help people self-host that stuff, but video is expensive.
Paul Graham wrote an essay about how everyone should get a PR firm to...let's be honest, lie, about their startups.
Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories.
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
He leans really hard on the idea that it's not lying, but he doesn't make a great case for it to be anything less. See:
Our greatest PR coup was a two-part one. We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market.
Absolutely disgusting.
However: HN was seeded with users who sprouted from YC. If you check the first few years, it was pretty heavily tied to here. Unlikely it would have worked without being tied to Graham's essays.
It's called access journalism, and it is far from limited to games. Even major news outlets tow the government line on press releases if they want to stay relevant. It's the way large existing power structures have subjugated and ruined journalism worldwide.
At some level, I suspect that at least most people waiting tables, going to auditions, and waiting for their big break knew it was a long odds crapshoot.
I wonder to what degree that's true of all the people chasing money on Instagram, YouTube, or Patreon. Certainly for software, for example, Patreon feels like something a lot of people latch onto in the belief that it's a sustainable business model and it almost certainly isn't. As you say though, at least those folks are probably reasonably well positioned to just get a regular 9-5 job.
Huh. '08/'09 is also about when Google started to get both worse (apparently declared defeat in the Great Search Spam War, for one thing) and evil, and about the time my early-Facebook-evangelizing friends started to say that it'd gone to shit and it was time to move on (and started to actually do that).
"There are basically four generations: the grandparents, the parents, the YouTubers, and the kids."
The YouTubers seem to occupy that niche of ephemeral stardom previously occupied primarily by pop musicians, movie actors, and professional athletes.
The athletes, actors, and musicians are still there (and some of them are of course YouTubers too), but I'm sure my son and his friends know far more 'native' YouTubers than other celebrities.
Not sure what this all means, although it did make me start paying much more attention to YouTube and led to some discussions with my son about what "infotainment" is and the dangers implicit in it.
internet 2.1 feels like lightning.
People don't deal with change well, but choosing to believe that the present is an exception to how the human world has operated for millennia only has a short term benefit - validation for those of us in the present. The negative effects of this belief include cutting one's self off from all the experiences of all the humans who came before us.
To learn how to deal with "Internet 2.1" in your life, consider reading some Aristotle, Plato, Alvin Toffler or Eric Higgs.
See: resurgence flat-earthers, neonazis, and other previously-buried-by-irrelevance groups, resurgence of measles + polio, seemingly endless toxic videos dispensed to young children via the 'next video' and 'recommendation' engines, and so on
Sure human behavior is the same as it ever was, but never before has it been so easy for me to affect some random schmuck in France, for example
All humans, or the ones you've met? ;)
You prove my point for my by mentioning all those groups... those sorts of people have ALWAYS been around, and probably will be as long as humanity exists. Ever hear of the Luddites? Or the Optimates in ancient Rome?
Certainly, mass media and the internet are new iterations of information distribution, but so were the printing press, the printed word itself, and even bardic songs going back centuries. Each time, the ability to spread information farther, faster and easier Changed Things.
There's a comfort in wanting to believe we live in an age that breaks all the rules, so a lot of people soothe themselves by thinking that it's ok if they're afraid of or not comfortable in the world because after all it's something no one has ever had to deal with before. That lie gives us a comforting feeling, and people prefer a comforting lie over a cold truth anytime.
Sure, the ability to affect a random person in another country is sort of new, but that's an artifact of the present level of technology we have. Having new technology to deal with is actually the status quo of human history. We just keep inventing.
Going back to the past, you could argue that the first printed bibles made it possible to spread a religion faster and farther than ever before, which is true... but the age in which the printing press was invented was not that unlike all the other ages of man... looking back, it was a significant change, but not an all changing event like the discovery of extra terrestrial life or the human machine singularity would be.
We can deal with the world just like we always have.
You are right that the printing press was very disruptive for its time. But I would say that every day since the beginning of the industrial revolution is living in a time that "breaks all the rules" as you say
I could retort that it is comforting to call me the crazy one but I still believe that this age of instant, accessible global communication is indeed unique and that, psychologically, we as a species are not ready to deal with it. All throughout history the groups that you and I speak of were always relatively localized; it was very difficult to build a movement that affected all of Europe, for example. Not impossible -- ideas were and are as infectious as ever -- but beset with much much more entropy
Could Russia have facilitated the kind of propaganda/misinformation campaign that it did for the 2016 elections without any of its ever needing to leave their Moscow office in WWII? All else held constant, could these flat-earther/antivax morons have reached nearly as many people and had their movements spread as far and wide as they have in the age of the printing press? No, because entropy. And even when movements did (Lutheranism, for example), it took years to take hold.
But, nobody is forcing them.. So I mean.. Its self inflicted.. So its a bit hard to garner sympathy.
Imagine losing an entire week of revenue for the company. That's a big deal to them.
Especially because their revenue is directly dependent on their popularity. If their content isn't available, people will just move on to the next best thing.
What is a bit different, as you say, is that they're catering to a fickle audience. If they take a month off or ratchet back their workload, a lot of viewers may move on to the next thing.
Everyone's time has value. It's just more visible in certain cases. Streaming and other modern entertainment stars are not the only ones who have this problem. If fact it's true for everyone.
I guess it's kinda like with terminal disease. Everyone will die and noone knows how much time they have ahead, but when you get a kind of tangible upper limit then suddenly this awarness materializes, even though it shouldn't change much. I think the parallel is that when you can estimate how much money you could get for your time it's harder to discard it. If your time were worth the same without your knowledge it'd be easier. It's just matter of being aware of the number.
Very few people are "forced" to do any job - unless you count things like "needing to pay rent and buy food", in which case we're all being forced. Either way, I'd say they deserve as much sympathy as anyone else.
...right?
Isn't this older than social media? Mass media stars, e.g. post-War movie stars, were similarly all-consumed.
Maybe one has to go back to e.g. Charlie Chaplin to find an era when this kind of celebrity wasn't the norm?
Being Internet-famous seems like the worst of both worlds; the celebrity of a big name and the costs that come with it, but not the wealth to help manage those costs.
An influencer isn't going to be spotted and followed every waking moment of their life the minute they leave their house, like Kanye West might. It's also a life you can drop entirely one day on a lark, unlike being Kanye West.
I think they have it better in this specific regard because their fans are younger and therefore have more limited resources, but that wouldn't help me personally sleep much better at night.
I tried both in private tab and normal tab if firefox and article was still paywalled.
Trying again in Chrome did the trick.