being part of the solution doesn't pay the bills
For professional videos, until there is a law that specifies that a monopoly (currently Google YouTube does seem like the only place where money making is possible) has to follow certain rules, they can throw you out for virtually any reason and it's not a secure way of making a living. So maybe it should be, but it currently isn't, and we can't currently force them to be.
Other platforms may not significantly help one to pay bills, I'm just wondering if that might not be okay given the sheer number of people who seem to have fun doing this. If not, we should make new laws.
Sure! We can definitely have charity content. Most of the content out there is.
Somebody's paying for most of the content most people want to watch, though.
A reasonable-quality single-camera A/V rig that a video producer would actually want to work with is comfortably in the middle four digits. Three cameras, low five. That money must come from somewhere, as must the rationalization for the time in a world as productized and generally fucked as ours, and "that's OK, art and media can just be done by wildly wealthy dilettantes in their spare time" is a shitty world.
I think it was prompted by seeing the name "Hodler" once and thinking it sounded like the cryptocurrency equivalent of Wainwright or Cooper.