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Comment by atticora | Hacker News Reader

I saw a YouTube video by a guy who specializes in building D&D characters. He spends twenty minutes going into detail on each one, and then makes the pitch for subscribing to his Patreon account with something like "members get all the details in a convenient list so that you don't have to keep going back to this video."

So he's using the same bit of friction that this article is trying to solve, to fill his rice bowl. It's a bit of a shame that fixing this problem for me will cause one for him.

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> So he's using the same bit of friction that this article is trying to solve, to fill his rice bowl.

You spelled out exactly what the attention economy is about. Friction. The money is made on friction. Waste - of time, of cognitive effort, of emotions good and bad.

I feel sorry for this guy, but at the same time, I wish people recognized that attention economy isn't about some nebulous attention you have too much of and don't feel when it's being taken. On the contrary, attention is stolen through friction, and the sum of everyone who "fills their rice bowls" this way is why the web and so many processes and activities on-line feel like shit and remain painfully wasteful.

I get it, but most content -- that you and I find helpful in so many different cases -- exists because it can be monetized.

And, to your point, friction-based monetization is one of the more effective ways to monetize your content.

If you can't monetize your content, what's the point in creating it? Creating a lot of this content takes time, and therefore many people won't create it if it's not worth their time.

If the world would just start paying directly for content (e.g. via Patreon), and if that was the only monetization needed, then maybe we could remove the painful friction (or other painful methods of monetization). But unfortunately, this will probably never be sufficient on its own.

>exists because it can be monetized

This in itself is a huge problem. The internet used to be a beacon of hope for information sharing, now it's all behind paywalls...to the point of ad-nauseam.

I understand not everything should be "free", but it's nearly impossible to access anything without the need for an account, pay to access it, get bombarded with adverts, reminded to "like & subscribe"....it's shit.

> I get it, but most content -- that you and I find helpful in so many different cases -- exists because it can be monetized.

That's a tragedy and it didn't use to be like this. In the past, you could use "exists to be monetized" as synonym to "garbage" and effectively filter such content[0] out of your browsing. Friction-based monetization is a giant "fuck you" to the user, so you can rightfully expect the quality and trustworthiness of content to match that attitude. The heuristic is still 100% valid, but it's increasingly hard to find anything other than content made for monetization[1].

I mean:

> If you can't monetize your content, what's the point in creating it?

The answer to that is, "you shouldn't".

> Creating a lot of this content takes time, and therefore many people won't create it if it's not worth their time.

Then those people should find a different, productive activity, and leave the "content creation" to people who are baffled at the question above, because for them, the reason is obvious - "because I can", or "for status", or "pay it forward", or "this would help others", or "the world would be a better place if people knew this thing I know". And none of that precludes asking people to pay for access.

> If the world would just start paying directly for content (e.g. via Patreon), and if that was the only monetization needed, then maybe we could remove the painful friction

No, let's not reverse the order in which things happened. Paying directly for content used to be the norm. It's nigh-impossible now, because everyone and their dog zeroed in on the perfect anti-competitive hack: free but with ads. This prevent almost all honest competition, because unless you have enough surplus to fund your creation yourself, you can't compete with free.

[0] - The use of the term "content" on its own implies we're dealing with facsimile without soul.

[1] - It's not that it doesn't exist - but rather, all the major platforms are, overtly or covertly, advertising platforms, so they both enable garbage peddlers and promote the garbage, because that's what pays their bills. In this way, it's not the centralization of the Internet alone that's the problem - it's centralization into platforms with structurally malicious incentives.

> The answer to that is, "you shouldn't".

Unless you enjoy it. Like the huge number of content creators who make little to no money on it, plus the huge number of content creators who do make money on it now but before they were able to.

I create content, heck i'm doing it right now, without being paid. Some is relatevly low value (but not none, I can see you like to spend time reading hn comments) but some ive made has touched thousands of people and been high effort stuff. Am I crazy? am I simply irrational?

No. People will create without incentive. put multiple humans in a box and wait, and culture will spontaneously be generated. Income is not, never will be, and has never, been a nessacary part of this equation.

In general ive observed a tragic cycle of vibrant communities blossoming into existence where everyone created because they want to, people have healthy engagement with it and get primarily positive vibes. Then over time, money invades, starts paying a select few of the creators and arbitrarily excluding others with no partiuclar pattern. Bad vibes ensue, and even those paid have to run in place and burn out. Content quality suffers, becoming less about creative expression and making audience happy, and more about extracting clicks, money, ads, buy, subscribe, like

the guy deserves to be compensated for his efforts. I think this is a pretty pessimistic take.

This is a slippery slope because now we're entering a stage where we're commodifying hobbies to the point that it stops being fun, and starts being another product or service that needs to be paid for, whereas previously, it was shared due to passion of said hobby.

I'm seeing it in one of the oldest hobbies I still entertain, RC cars. Small shops have all but went under, everyone buys from the internet, and when you can't figure out how to repair something, you're paying a massive fee for a specialist to figure it out. Adults can deal with this begrudgingly, but this was a child focused hobby primarily, and now we're pricing them out of it.

But he doesn't deserve to steal from me to get it.

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Maybe if your business model includes putting things in an inconvenient format that could best be replaced by a bulleted list, you should rethink your business model.

If that's truly what you're doing, sure. If you can reduce a movie to its screenplay without losing value, that's probably what you should be doing. A recipe is a great complement to a cooking video, but reducing the value of a cooking video's value to the recipe is oversimplified.

I wish we'd go the other way, where free text content is complemented by paid-for audio or video commentary. But it has to be a very dull video for a bullet list to be a good replacement (and a bad bullet list to be able to capture what a good video production can convey).

Yeah no. There are probably amazing and insightful cooking videos out there, but the moment you intentionally withold the recipe unless people pay, you're using a disadvantage of the medium for rent-seeking.

> A recipe is a great complement to a cooking video, but reducing the value of a cooking video's value to the recipe is oversimplified.

There is a simple test to make here: is the complimentary recipe released to the viewer, so that they can read it conveniently and at their own pace? If the recipe is truly a complement to otherwise great cooking video, then releasing it is a no-brainer. If it's withheld, then one has to wonder why, and what the video publisher is afraid of.

A lot of this is actually caused by Google in benefiting observability of videos that are longer so they (google) can show more ads. You either get a 60 second short, or 10ish minutes. This leads content creators to stretch out their videos longer than they really should be.

Have you considered paying for the patreon regardless because you consume his content one way or another and value it?

I consume hundreds or thousands of creators' content that I value more than this particular channel. If I felt the duty to donate to each one, let alone subscribe, I would consume much less of it and live in a smaller world.

Perhaps it is a rationalization, but I don't feel that consuming content that someone offers to me for free creates an obligation on my part, whether I love it or not.

And don't they make money from ads or subscriptions via YouTube or whatever platform they're on? I don't want to bother paying each creator, but I'm fine subscribing to YouTube or Pandora.

interesting. you can't afford to compensate all of the creators whose content you consume, so none of them shall receive compensation?

there is no obligation, it's just a good and kind thing to do.

I'm looking for the implication of the above that "none of them shall receive compensation" from me and not finding it.

fair, I did not assume positive intent

I agree that you are not obligated to pay, as in you don't deserve to have debt for consuming things you value. I think it may be a rationalization to argue that you shouldn't try to. Although maybe there is a difference of opinion on separating an obligation from an ought to.

Justifying why it's okay to feel entitled to the content for free (due to lots of available free content) even though it provides a personal value to you is what oversteps in the wrong direction to me, if that's part of your take.

I should probably clarify that merely grabbing or holding your attention is not what I mean by providing value. I mean it saves you time, it gives you conversation topics, it helps you grow, its something you look forward to consuming, it isnt just taking attention you didnt know what to do with, etc. In kther words, there's something specific to the content that resonates with you.

Its possible you just don't value this content all that much, even if you do appreciate it and find it interesting - which is okay.

Value is very subjective and personal, there's no way to codify what I'm saying here.

And it's also fair to argue that you are paying for most of these things with your time and attention, although with your specific example an improvement was theorized that would give you the same value while saving you time, and that translated to paying the creator less. Something about the specifics there didn't seem right

I think ideally the creator would be compensated by PrintThatVideo, who is taking their content and repurposing it.

I mean, I expect someone to make this a module for something than can be ran on your own computer with LLAMA (or whatever) in pretty short order.

The attention market cycle is wrapping up and at this rate AI/LLMs will further kill the market for grabbing your attention by filtering that crap out. Grab the signal, filter the noise.

Yuval Noah Harari is likely correct, the future isn't about attention, it's about intimacy.

> The attention market cycle is wrapping up and at this rate AI/LLMs will further kill the market for grabbing your attention by filtering that crap out. Grab the signal, filter the noise.

That's not my impression at all, but I suppose we'll see which force prevails - user filtering out noise with AI, vs. producers generating much greater volume of low-quality noise with AI tools, and some of them also using AI tools to make some types of noise harder to discern.

Is that a counterargument? It doesn’t seem like one. Why does it matter where and how the content is repurposed? If there is value found and extracted and the person that created that value isn’t compensated then we have a problem. No more incentives to create value.

Do you remember what was the channel? Thanks

https://www.youtube.com/@DnDDeepDive

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