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Comment by Anon1096 | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with the article that the top couple content creators can walk away and kill a platform. Vine committed suicide for no real reason, it's a pretty poor example to point to. Nowadays on any top social media there's 1-3% of creators making the vast majority of popular content, but more importantly, there's another 15% of people out there who are vying to try and take their spots and will gladly fill the void should the top creators leave. They're mostly just not doing well because the top is being crowded out (and the algorithm keeps it that way), not for lack of trying.

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With content creation platforms there is absolutely no way one person or even ten people at the highest levels could kill them by leaving. In fact, as has been shown on Youtube and Twitch it usually makes the platform healthier because there's not one monolith to develop a strategy around bootlegging from. There have been several dozen gargantuan channels and several hundred giant channels on Youtube who have either left or just stopped uploading and Youtube still carries on. Youtube isn't carried by the Mr. Beasts and FailArmies who grab forty million views an upload, it's carried by thousands of smaller channels who get less than a million views per video. With places like Reddit, Tumblr, and Imgur there are no giants, as everything is siloed so much that users in one community don't know much of what's outside that community, making it impossible for a handful of creators leaving to kill it.

This is true in 2026, much less true 10 years ago. The environments aren’t compareable and there are way more options than there used to be.

I think "killing a platform" is less interesting than "birthing a competitor". And the Mixer experiment of 2021 suggests that the top dozen creators 5 years ago still wasn't enough to even foster a new platform. Market capture at this scale is truly sticky.

As another example. We're some 8 years into the "streaming wars", with a lot of top content leveraging their IP's. Netflix still seems to be long, and the only one profitable (though I wager it is not profitable on sustainable measures). Disney, HBO, paramount, and many more have struggled despite weilding much more well known programming. Being early is just so important in these situations.

Agreed. Microsoft tried this with Mixer (twitch competitor) and shut it down a year later. They paid top streamers handsomely to be exclusive

Vine died because Twitter made sure it died. The same with Periscope, nothing more.

Vines back actually by the guy that killed it

https://www.newsweek.com/divine-everything-we-know-about-vin...

I'm not sure if it's an issue of the percentage of users creating content, but rather the percentage of new content creators zooming to the level of average ai copy which is higher than their starting point.

I do wonder if it will limit or improve their growth to learn to communicate beyond it as the drivers behind the seat instead of the passengers.

> Nowadays on any top social media there's 1-3% of creators making the vast majority of popular content, but more importantly, there's another 15% of people out there who are vying to try and take their spots and will gladly fill the void should the top creators leave. They're mostly just not doing well because the top is being crowded out (and the algorithm keeps it that way), not for lack of trying.

If the thesis of the OP is that “slop” is infinite... it’s pretty obvious that taking away the top “content” creators is a self-slop correcting problem.

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