How the Birth of the Influencer Led to the Death of Hobbies | Hacker News Reader

How the Birth of the Influencer Led to the Death of Hobbies

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44 pointsanarbadalov14 comments

> We built an entire industry around the idea that “you too can become me”

> [....]

> The rise of the influencer became a potent growth engine for all of these platforms. It ensured that the aspiring creators would keep feeding the social media beast, and keep playing stupid games to win stupid prizes (likes, hearts, retweets).

> And in return, we got status games, status anxiety, FOMO and a whole cocktail of other issues. All of this has been detrimental to our creativity.

And of course a scheme like that [people living in small groups of, say, 50 people, in which several would have great social value and a role as story tellers, singers of songs, et c.] doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibitionist".

How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!"

- Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard, 1987.

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I think the reality of this observation has remained the same, and after a brief period of confusion, the promise of success and reward for creative people has expanded, and the promise itself has been commercialized, without much expanding the actual likelihood of it. There may be just a few more total winners, now, through the creation of more areas of competition, but it's still winner-take-all.

My wife photographs for a hobby, she posts on social media for business purposes, but not to influence.

She does woodworking to help herself and friends.

She knits for family gifts.

0/3 for my wife.

Next person, me.

I build inventions because I learn new things and get something that makes life lazier.

Not sure if reading nonfiction is a hobby, but I'm not repeating quotes on Twitter. I enjoy enlightenment.

Oh I do have a for profit business that I'm attempting to influence people. But it's not a hobby, it's a for profit company.

Maybe this article is just clickbait.

It is clickbait. Even when growing up it was common when having a good meal to say something like 'This is amazing, you should open a restaurant'. There's little to no expectation that the person cooking would actually open a restaurant, it's just a nice compliment.

Many people pursue clicks and likes for revenue, but many people don't. If I put one of my songs on youtube, I don't really expect to make any money on it, or even to get likes or whatever. But a few people do see them, and like them, and apparently enjoy them. I'm OK with whatever here.

And that is the mistake the author makes. Sure, many people are trying to game their side hustle into revenue and careers, but many, many more people aren't. They just do it for fun, and if something comes out of it, great.

The former may be more visible than the latter, but there are plenty of the latter out there.

I'm with you. I've been releasing records for almost two decades, happily selling through a hundred copies of a release and moving on to the next project. But I don't think the author is seeing that and assuming I'm trying to turn my hobby/passion into a side hustle because I'm putting out albums. And I think there are plenty of people doing exactly the same thing with their art — putting it out there, occasionally finding an audience but not counting on feedback or looking for recognition or extra income. It took me a while to be comfortable with this.

At the core of the issue the author is addressing, I think, is status anxiety, which he briefly mentions. I've certainly felt it. It's easy to envy someone with a similar hobby, who's making a living doing it. It does seem like a different kind of pressure these days, at least for those of us with anxiety, to succeed, so it can be hard to slow down and find meaning and joy in a hobby. And it must be especially difficult for someone younger who grew up in this noisy environment.

I would counter the article that it isn't the death of hobbies, its a choice and effort to make a business. In the world of woodworking there are a lot of channels on social media where people are showing off stuff they did, get big enough and then get sponsors or ad revenue. Some sell plans, even make tools.

I don't choose to spend a large amount of time, just hobby level projects. I have thought about what it would take for a channel and came to the conclusion that it involves a huge amount of work is nothing related to woodworking - video and audio capture, editing, marketing, etc. Even planning projects around those things - doing something on one tool and moving to another step on another tool would be much more involved if I was trying to capture video.

Maybe there is a need for more of an artists guild type of site where people can share their work but only for non-commercial purposes.

Value is personal first. Art is a way of reflecting the world and finding yourself.

Value in the eyes of the masses has nothing to do with arts. Money, fame and success are not the motivational driver behind the process of artistic endeavour.

I paint because I love painting, creating and experimenting.

Everything else is secondary.

Years ago, I stopped my professional painting career over pressure generated by my success.

People don’t realize that some things have deep personal value and meaning outside the socially acceptable models and cannot be measured with monetary values.

This article is sentimental clickbait.

I think the birth of the influencer muddied the signal to noise ratio of people who do hobbies for creativity/fulfillment and people who do hobbies for status. It's probably true that some people who would have done these things for themselves are now doing it for influence, but I'd guess more that what we're seeing is that people who otherwise never would have been photographers or artists or writers are now doing those things.

>We use to have hobbies. Now, we have side hustles.

I definitely agree with this, but I wouldn't blame it on the internet. My generation grew up being told to follow their dreams, that we could do whatever we wawnted if we worked hard enough. I think many of us have dreams that we've been holding on to, but with the understanding that dreams are expensive. So the prominence of side hustles is people trying to be efficient with their time and money.

It's not the influencer, more the internet in general. If you have a 100% offline hobby, where your outputs are your own, and you never digitise them to be shared, let alone monetised into a hustle, you don't exist as far as this article is concerned.

I really do not relate at all with this article.

There is no doubt that some people will see the opportunity to cash in or become "celebrities" through their hobbies.

But I think there's an healthy number of people that still do it for pleasure.

I keep regularly posting my bedroom-produced music to Soundcloud and bandcamp, but feel completely free of pressure. My work is completely anonymous and it's out there for whoever wants to listen. In fact, the only reason to put it out there is because I like showing my work, definitely, but I truly have no desire for recognition. I guess when it comes to my hobbies, I don't have an ego to bruise.

“One of the easiest ways to hate something you love is to turn it into your job: taking the thing that keeps you alive spiritually and turning it into the thing that keeps you alive literally” — Austin Kleon

I have never read this quote before, but I've been saying the same exact thing to people for the last 20 years.

A corollary is: "Do what you love and the money will come." No. This may be true for a small percentage of people, but not for 95%. First, running a business is completely different from a hobby. And secondly, if there's no market, then there's no market. You're not going to turn left-handed toenail clippers for midgets who are between the ages of 17 and 22 years old. There's just not a big enough market. That's a silly example, but there's just some things where there's not enough buyers, or to reach the buyers, it's too expensive.

I listened to that siren song of turning what you love into a job, and that was the worst mistake of my life. I grew to hate it.

Let's say you bake pies and love it. It's your thing. So someone suggests that you do it for a living, because your pies are so great, and you decide to do it. Well. You start doing it commercially. Instead of doing pies when you wish, you MUST wake up at 3am every morning to start baking your fresh pies for the next day (which would eliminate me instantly...3 am, pssh.). You have employees so you have to deal with payroll. And what happens if you get a contract to deliver 500 pies to nearby grocery stores every day? And then, because you need such great quantities, you get substandard ingredients and have to use them if that's all there is, something you'd never do if you baked for yourself...you'd just wait for better ingredients. It goes on and on, whether you sell pies or services, or whatever it is.

Regarding "do what you love" I haven't yet been able to find a high-paying job whose primary responsibilities are taking naps, watching tv/streamed video, eating snacks, playing games, and posting on HN.

But I'm still looking.

Yeah, that's called being in kindergarden. Just rent a room and fill it with kids toys and charge full grown adults $1,500 each per day to go back to kindergarden, for the experience of it. Then you join them and voila, you could probably make a few million dollars a year if you open in all the large cities around the USA and world.

Personally it feels like the author is unloading their personal gripes. Maybe it’s because I’m out of the tech bubble, but I’ve never had any desire to monetize any of my hobbies, nor do my friends.

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