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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

It's a no win situation. People ignore independent creatives while consuming more established and popular media. Share your own work, people attack you. Meanwhile if you don't share your work, no one sees it.

Then you read articles whining about how hard it is to find interesting content and escape the prison of social media.

It's not because independent creators don't exist. But there are a lot of barriers to getting traction at all.

And if you try to even comment on the topic in a discussion of this sort, odds are good people will act like it is a nefarious plot to self promote. It's maddening.

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> It's a no win situation

Exactly! That's what I meant by tragedy of the commons. It sucks for everybody, consumers and creators alike, and there is no satisfactory solution. I empathize, I am an independent creator myself, and I know the pain. For what it's worth, it helped me to change my mindset from sprint to marathon, and accept that success, if any, would be slow.

I also feel that the modern web's lust for stats is doing more harm than good. If one's follower count isn't growing, the dopamine dries up. Falling listener stats? Enjoy that depression! Better to ignore the stats and use "is this still worthwhile" as one's compass when possible.

Why do you keep using the term "whining" to reference the article?

Hah, I have had the same thought a few times. I didn't think I was whining!

I've been on HN a lot of years. Lots of people here have money and as a group most of them consistently object to essentially any means to monetize content, pay content creators, etc while denying that this amounts to expecting slave labor from writers and also decrying the tragic lack of good quality writing.

I used to try to consistently point out such patterns while being personally attacked, told to stop whining, stop expecting to make money from writing as it's simply not realistic and "get a real job."

People here want a quality experience online. And they want it for free (including ad-free).

Often while they, themselves, make good money for writing the code that runs the internet. Somehow, that's different.

Well let me respond, since maybe I'm one of those guys.

You've fundamentally misunderstood what I want. If a "writer" wrote it as part of their job, I don't want to read it. I mean, I might, but that's not what I would be "whining" about here.

I've kept blogs most of my life. I'm after similar content to what I would post.

I don't care to read whatever you want to get paid to write. No offense, I'm sure it's great and worth all the money.

The quality experience is enjoying other people's gardens, and the point of having the garden is to share it with other people, not to have a ticket booth or a billboard. At least, that's the case at my blog. Which I've never shared here, and nobody else ever has either. Which I find totally fine.

You seem to be assuming some things different from my reality.

I make very little money from blogging. I took ads off years ago. It's not some kind of paid gig shilling for some product or whatever.

I have a Patreon that makes too little and I take tips. I try to write what I think is meaningful.

My writing has repeatedly made the front page of HN, often without making a dime.

I've stopped posting it here. I'm tired of feeling kicked in the teeth for "self promoting".

Journalism is in trouble. This undermines political freedom. Etc. And yet people just expect high traffic to pay the bills, which it can if your monetization strategy is ads, but the HN crowd is fond of ad blockers and vocally critical of ads.

Anyway, I don't care to argue it. You asked a question. I replies. This conversation is most likely a waste of time.

Adieu.

> And yet people just expect high traffic to pay the bills, which it can if your monetization strategy is ads, but the HN crowd is fond of ad blockers and vocally critical of ads.

For me the problem is not ads but the inevitable AdTech pushed under the guise of "ads". Too many sites want me to enable what they call ads but are really incredibly invasive spying systems. Many are compromised and actually deliver malware.

The whole situation is made worse by the "ads" serving up a bunch of shit I didn't ask for. The text content of some article is a fraction of the size of the tracking scripts and auto-playing video. Everyone could save a lot on costs by not serving me a multi-megabyte video next to a 30kB blog post.

I took ads off my websites years ago. I have no problem with the HN crowd being anti ad.

I'm just saying we have the means to pay content creators right now and the reality is people mostly expect free content and implicitly assume that if you have sufficient traffic, you are making money and the reality is that assumption de facto has baked in an ad-based monetization strategy.

Micropayments as people would like to imagine them don't yet exist.

Good writing takes time.

You want more of it, you should find a way to make it pay and, no, implicitly assuming an ad-based revenue model where you don't have to take a crowbar to your wallet and put it open and explicitly blocking ads and wanting nothing to do with them adds up to "Hello? Exactly how do you expect creative to make rent?"

people are making tons of money on substack. so why not you?

> I don't care to read whatever you want to get paid to write.

Writers don't write to get paid, but they need to get paid to be able to continue to write. When writing seriously for high quality content, you need to treat it like a full time job, with massive focus. So if they can't get paid, then the only people with a voice are those with a comfortable income from somewhere else and a lot of time on their hands. And that's a very small subset of the population.

It's like enjoying food you get for free at a friend's house and returning the favor, but being insulted at the idea of paying in a restaurant.

I would love to see a viable micropayment model (a la Jaron Lanier's years of suggestions) that takes the baby steps we've already made (e.g. Patreon, Substack) and accelerates us to a place where all value is compensated.

Micropayments of just a few cents is basically how many ads work. I've already stated that HN hates ads.

You can currently pay as little as a dollar via PayPal and it's like 67 cents for the recipient (or was last I checked). Lots of people just feel that's not micro enough and not frictionless enough.

The point would be micropayments without the ads - which are mostly noise anyway.

From the creator POV YouTube and Kindle Unlimited approach this model. So does Spotify, to an extent.

But the payments are much smaller than the value generated. And creators are at the mercy of gigantic centralised content distribution machines which can destroy your career on a whim, or because of an unfortunate outbreak of stupidity and bureaucracy.

There isn't anything like a federated micropayments system which would offer aggregation and payment services, but would be run at cost - a bit like the cultural equivalent of a credit union.

Hey :wave:, I've been on HN for ages too and have seen you here forever. You're not the only one that's observed this behavior. A lot of us know it. The HN crowd thinks monetization is this gross, evil thing but also thinks the quality of content is in decline and only caters to the lowbrow. As you say, good writing from good writers (really good content from good creators) needs time, stability, and the safety to explore ideas. All of this requires money.

This crowd likes to point out that the early web had this kind of content, but they forget that the early web was composed mostly of perspectives from folks who had those luxuries and honestly had been only writing for a few years on the web. I remember trying in vain to find anything about the rap scene which was huge in my low-income area and in a lot of low-income America at the time but the truth was, none of the rappers who ended up making it in the mid-90s ever were situated in a way that would make it easy for them to use the Web to put their content out there. That's why everyone on the Web at the time was into heavy metal even though rap was flourishing in the US. The demographic that used the Web wore khakis at work and listened to metal at home.

I've (and my friends) just learned to ignore this content. It's a yearning for a more country club like internet. The neighborhood was a lot quainter when only the golfers with their luxury cars lived here. Now the riff raff wants to bike or drive their Mustangs and it's all lowest common denominator drivel.

I was homeschooling at a time when there were some really wonderful free resources on the internet to support that. One woman did handwriting consulting and eventually took the free resources off her website because it conflicted with her efforts to support herself as a consultant and at that time there was nothing like Patreon.

"Freedom isn't free." Neither is a free internet. Someone has to somehow put in the time and effort, etc.

You need to either find a way to pay some of these people or accept that what's here will mostly be the hobbies of the comfortably well off and can disappear at a moment's notice on a whim.

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