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Comment by boarnoah | Hacker News Reader

The mid 2000s era was a really magical time for me growing up.

Just the sheer amount of interesting games and videos available on places like NewGrounds and Kongregate was something else. It was kind of crazy how easy it was at the time to get at least some attention to any proof of concept project simply by posting onto said sites.

Something that has definitely gotten much harder over time despite the more advanced tools that are available to hobbyists these days.

I think it was a mix of how easy flash made it to go from some vector art drawn in app, to hooking up some key-frames together with logic for a game etc... But it was also IMO strongly influenced by the internet culture at time, where there was (at least it felt like) a larger audience of people available to try out wacky often no/low-budget things.

I haven't quite seen the same environment emerge on places Itch.IO and to an extent Steam.

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I think today's creative youth are on Twitch and TikTok.

I'm not sure if they're building the same kind of future capital and skill sets that we did, but maybe it'll turn out well for them. Especially if there's an explosion in the creative economy.

Still, it's incredibly hard to beat a technology that teaches kids to program as a side effect. Flash and early web raised up a generation of engineers.

Seems reasonable that being a content creator is a viable career for young people as automation and globalization continue to eat jobs.

TikTok is probably teaching vital skills for their futures.

Content creator is a vanishingly small lottery winner occupation now and in the future unless it’s connected to a product in some way.

How much of every corporate job is communicating / consensus vs doing?.

Arguably "content creation" is core to every > middle class job now - you have to get people onboard to get things done. Personally I still think writing is more valuable but perhaps the knowledge creation and sharing (_inside_ companies) of tomorrow will be done by making and watching videos.

I very much do not want to be part of that future, but I recognise it a likely possibility.

>will be done by making and watching videos.

Arguably, it's the case today to some degree with company meetings/team meetings/etc. typically recorded for people who couldn't attend live. But it's pretty low bandwidth for most purposes to communicate basic facts in the absence of interaction. I for one rarely listen to recordings of meetings I miss and I assume I'm pretty typical. For many purposes I'd much prefer a 1 page email.

It's like all the how-tos on the Internet that don't really have a visual component but are a video anyway.

> How much of every corporate job is communicating / consensus vs doing?

From experience as the corporation gets larger communicating and communicating-adjacent activities approach 90-95% of the time. The remainder is doing.

'Communicating' and 'performing' are two different skill sets. I believe on TikTok, you are doing the latter.

"Content creators" almost universally only make significant money when the content they create are ads or porn. It's also about as viable a career choice as "becoming a pop star" was a while ago.

I sponsor a couple of folks on Patreon and Github, and none of them create porn.

I think there's a future where long tail art can be funded on an artisanal level by patrons, and the network will connect consumers to artists that satisfy their interests.

Are you interested in an alternate history Oregon Trail where an alien invasion forces westward migration? Or perhaps a time travelling Jacques Cousteau serial where the protagonist searches for love across the ages?

Somebody will make something weird that satisfies your interests and you will pay them directly. And it'll be better than canned Star Wars spam. It'll be real, and the creator will know you by name.

ML and automation will bring down the cost of content creation dramatically and make it look and feel more compelling than the studio stuff we get today.

Same for me. It's much more natural for me to pay an actual person ten bucks a month for what they do then to subscribe to a streaming service for the same amount of money. It's nice to know one's contribution actually makes an impact to someone whom I appreciate, that it's not just a drop in a gigantic bucket like a Netflix or Prime or Disney+ subscription.

> I sponsor a couple of folks on Patreon and Github, and none of them create porn.

...that you know about. :)

> "Content creators" almost universally only make significant money when the content they create are ads or porn.

Don't go into creating porn with that mindset, it's not a guarantee you'll make significant money. It's still better than creating advertisement though.

That's like saying in 2013 that being a Soundcloud rapper was going to be a viable career choice.

0.1 per cent of those on TikTok, or any other sharecropping platform will be able to extend their online persona into something that makes money.

Content creation is an elite

Only a few make a living out of it

And there's a limit on the amount of tik tok like videos that will get attention, once everybody will start making them

Comparing the creativity of youngsters doing voice-overs in TikTok to that of early 2000's teenagers creating full-fledged games and entire films with Flash is... I don't know.

As you said in your last paragraph, Flash _raised up_ a generation of engineers by _lowering_ the entry barriers to a minimum. TikTok is just a showcase for attw's.

Don't be an old curmudgeon. :) There were a couple of absolute gems in the Flash era but there was an absolute boatload of crap as well. The most creative TikTok-ers are absolutely innovating storytelling and filmography just as the most creative Flash creators were innovating in their own medium.

It's just that when we look back we remember the gems but not the river of crap, but when we look at the present we see the river too.

Where was the majority of user and creator attention dedicated to on the 2 platforms though?

> There were a couple of absolute gems in the Flash era but there was an absolute boatload of crap as well.

Don't 90% of Youtube videos get less than a thousand views [0]? There are millions of videos on TikTok, I'd imagine the algorithm results in the same 80-20 ish sort of balance.

Yes, there were bad Flash projects. But just like everything else, we remember the good ones.

[0]: https://9to5google.com/2020/08/10/almost-90-of-all-uploaded-...

Personally I can't help but think that this is our fault, as an industry, for abandoning the idea that users should be able to create programs. In the 8-bit micro era computers booted into a programming environment, then we had things like QBasic coming standard with the OS, then things like VB, HyperCard, Delphi, and to a lesser extent Excel and Access. For a while, enabling users to create their own tools to suit their needs was considered valuable in personal computing.

That's not how we do things anymore. Now everything is an appliance and the user is cattle as far as the developer is concerned.

I don't think it was the developers who made that call though.

I think it was. Talk about how horrible it is to pile so many abstraction layers together and developers will come out of the woodwork to talk about how much time it saves them. In a lot of cases, developers are rewriting things over and over again in the latest framework-du-jour simply to pad their resumes when they abandon their current employer in two years. Then they turn around and put all the blame on other people like children.

To expand on this, developer culture is to view good human factors almost as a badge of shame. If you press the issue with "this is a horrible experience that gets in your way in a thousand tiny and not so tiny ways", the response is almost always "if you can't handle tiny inconvenience #386, you weren't cut out to be a programmer". Witness the sheer scorn heaped on GUIs.

It's a kind of gatekeeping behavior - "I suffered through memorizing a bunch of git commands by rote, and now you have to as well."

here's some nuance: there's plenty of kids showing off programming stuff/tricks/apps on tiktok and plenty of kids getting inspired to try something themselves because of it. It is the very fact that it seems 'doable' and fun/cool that way.

I was inspired by my uncle’s copy of Flash 5 and his little projects. That eventually prompted my downloading of Game Maker 6 and lead directly to my being a software engineer.

It's definitely not quite the same thing, but I think some of that on-ramp is happening in places like Minecraft and Roblox, and in creation environments like PICO-8.

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