42 sats \ 4 replies \ @siggy47 7 Jun 2023 \ on: Value for Value - Time, Talent, and Treasure | dergigi.com bitcoin
I read Gigi's first essay, Dear Netizen. I still wonder if value for value is a viable model for content creators on the internet. Gigi is about as good as we get in the bitcoin world. Is he generously rewarded? I don't know, and he's not saying. He uses the analogy of tipping and busking, two sources of income that virtually never provide "a living."
I guess it's too early to tell, but I'm skeptical.
Decades of inflationary economics have warped our perception of "generously rewarded" and "a living".
Attention is a finite commodity so the democratization of content creation probably means spreading the payments thinner, but that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. Also, not every content creator on the internet is doing it for a living. People post on social media all the time. Some of them are "influencers," the rest just have their opinions monetized by Big Tech. I'd rather post here and make a few thousand sats a month.
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I agree with just about everything you said, but I'd venture that neither of us are using those sats to feed our families. We have another source of income. I'm talking about whether the model can take the place of traditional media where content producers do earn their living in this work. I'm not talking about Twitter posters.
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So, a few things.
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I'm not sure I want traditional media to be replaced. They are an important source of truth. You might be laughing out loud now, which is justified. The mainstream media definitely screwed up big time in recent years, but at the core, I think there is tremendous value in having a source of information that is costly to produce and disseminate - there is a cost to spreading lies. Again, they haven't lived up to it in recent years, but I think with the increasing ability and availability of tools to create fake news (especially images), there will be tremendous incentive for traditional media to regain that trust, and a lot of benefits for consumers.
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Independent content creators are a good check on media malfeasance - they can cover topics that the mainstream does not. However, since everything is a fight for attention that can monetized, the internet became a shitshow and the traditional media got dragged down with it. If you create a better incentive structure for the small guys, they'll be a better check on the big guys.
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As for the original question, can small content creators make a living? I think some of them definitely will. I mean look at substack, there's definitely some people making money over there.
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Maybe "professional content creator/journalist" is not a useful category anymore. Maybe the market prefers a PhD student doing research on a niche topic and writing articles on the side that provide enormous value to the 100 people worldwide that read it.
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You make valid points. A few things.
Regarding traditional media. I'll put aside the nightmare propaganda we are living through now. If you take media in the US in the 20th century, I would argue things were just as bad then. It has always been a propaganda machine, and always will be. A few examples: FDR was never filmed in a wheelchair. The average American had no idea he had polio. The Vietnam War was sold to the average American as preventing the March of communism, then they lied about casualties, the Tet Offensive, The My Lai Massacre, and the fact that the US was losing. I could go on and on.
I agree independent content producers are critical. That why I worry about their ability to earn. The substack writers who make it are either ostracized legacy media guys or content producers who are earning through subscriptions.
My point is that we're all basically self interested. I'm not sure we'll pay for what we can get for free.
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