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Comment by smfugit | Hacker News Reader

The UN report on the Attention Economy says 0.5% of content produced is consumed.

No other industry works like this. And thats without any AI involvement.

In that context this entire fight between creators and content publishers/distributors is a gigantic farce.

We are already drowning in an ever growing ocean of content. These people want to be rewarded without doing any single thing to reduce the size of that ocean. They think the ocean will alway expand. Its just as absurd to watch as the sub prime crisis.

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Assuming this[1] is the report you’re referring to:

> By the 2000s, so much information was being generated worldwide that only a small fraction (0.5% in 2015) of the digital data generated was being analyzed at all. [emphasis mine]

Not only is it ‘data analyzed’ and not ‘content consumed,’ but I can’t figure out what they mean by ‘analyzed’ either. Reading the rest of the paragraph makes me think that this is talking about things like clickstream data that businesses love to collect “so we can use big data to enhance user engagement” and then leave to pile up in their data warehouse once they discover that data analysis is hard; if so, this statistic is unrelated to the production:consumption ratio of “content” in the sense of things that people might want to look at on its own merits.

[1]: https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_...

I don't understand this statistic - even a child's macaroni picture gets seen by their teachers and parents.

But does it get savored?

What does 0.5% of content even mean? Are you referring to content people are actually paid to produce?

He's right in that art consumption is an attention based economy. 0.5% would not surprise me. I think his conclusion is wrong though. He seems to question the need for a strike in the economic environment he described, but that environment is exactly why organized labor is important. Unions can make trying to pursue creative work professionally slightly more bearable.

If you're including every amateur unpaid artist, then sure maybe 0.5%.

BUT if you're talking about paid professional TV and film production (the context of SAG-AFTRA), probably something like 95% of content that is written, shot and edited into a final product makes it to audiences. After all, that stuff is expensive.

By the hour, most of that content is TV shows. Most of the unseen ~5% is produced pilot episodes that didn't get picked up for a full season. And a small amount will be films that halted production midway, or turned out to be so bad they weren't released.

I'd say that sounds accurate for open source projects. Calculate how many GitHub projects have a "used by" section.

That’s an odd methodology that would conclude React isn’t “used by” anyone.

Is this some thinly veiled comment against video gaming?

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