In this case I don’t think so. YouTube, like all social media, has systemic and algorithmic problems in what they reward and in their transparency. But it’s wise when reading a Cory polemic to bear in mind that it may only have a tangential relationship to his sourced material.
Both mental illness and occupational burnout can effect people of any age, from students to the middle-aged to seniors. You’re free to believe otherwise or not, but I’ve been quite clear that there’s no either/or here.
Well, the fact that you didn’t watch the video shows you weren’t intentionally taking a dump on the disabled, but in taking Cory’s narrative at face value, that’s what you ended up doing. I’m going to treat commenters as though they read or watched the source material unless otherwise indicated, but I appreciate your honesty about having not done so.
There are also professional mimes and dirt bike racers and football players and clowns. Whether or not you or I personally value a particular form of performance art (and I certainly don’t value e-sports) has little bearing on whether the economy as a whole values it. And companies that employ workers to extract that value merit scrutiny.
I gather it’s a job that the subject has decided is of superior benefit to society irrespective of the market value and therefor exclusively deserving of consideration for working conditions. Which is kind of ironic for a commenter that named themselves @NotASocialist.
I’m not actually strongly committed on this; just dropping links because I knew they were there.
My main point was just to highlight the fact that Youtube is not just Logan Paul style idiocy. There is a lot of valuable content on there, particularly on the educational/history side of things.
Uh… YT has always been fuzzy on the terms and conditions and has only gotten fuzzier with time. They force take downs of videos all the time for bogus claims - and organizing a group of trollies to destroy a channel takes little effort because of it.
The shuttering of PBS Infinite Series. I’m an idiot at math, but it was sterling stuff with a comment section that gave you hope for the world. Lots of the woodworking youtubers have started making what amounts to commercials for the real instructional videos that are now only available to Patreon subscribers.
There is a really useful subculture of maker videos that seems to be getting squished.
Technically, I am only suggesting to kill youtube, not the content creators. If you think about it, the mere presence of youtube prevents other solutions to exist, because youtube is a de facto monopoly. Probably if you tube was not there, we would have a choice of various venues for creators with different financing terms.
Youtube is typical of late stage capitalism: it is a monopoly and it also only is a middle man: it creates nothing and also sells nothing. It can only exist as a single point of contact between producers of content, financing and consumers of content. There, it can dictates its terms to all parties, because it monopolises that single point. A parasitic relationship typical of late stage capitalism.
From that point, it can also convince “useful idiots” (that is an historical term, not an insult, look it up) to defend its business because “it helps creators”. In truth, Youtube does not help creators as this post shows. It destroyed considerable value: before youtube, someone with talent and a camera had a real chance to work as a small corporate video production unit or for a TV channel. Not so much anymore. Youtube changed that market and not for the best.
So: no, I am not impressed by youtube and I think it can only be replaced by something better for creators and consumers if it disappeared.
I think it’s a category mistake to talk about YouTube as if it were an employer. There’s no employment contract, the workers don’t control the means of production, and most importantly there is zero wage elasticity – YouTube can (and does) make money without paying creators at all, so the handful of star creators have next to no leverage in negotiating wages. Labor economics just doesn’t cover this situation.
A better economic analogy for YouTube would be the dance competition in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?. There’s an element of skill in winning, so it’s a step above being a “professional gambler”, but it’s still just a game, run on the proviso that most players will lose.
Youtube clearly has a place, it just needs direct competition. It sort of has competition from other services but there isn’t exactly an analogous competitor… Twitch, kind of but not really. And ideally the space needs more than one successful competitor to keep the medium healthy. Right now alternatives kind of exist but nothing truly viable for creators.
I know there are other video sharing sites, but none with the size of youtube, and especially not the networking. And most importantly, not the advertisers that generate the revenue. That is where youtube played a long game from its inception to now. And I didn’t directly respond to the previous snark, but it DOES provide a service. The investment to deliver that much content and bandwidth as well as it does is pretty impressive.
One CAN host vidoes on their own website/vlog, but you would be surprised how expensive that can get if you are really popular. Depending who your host is etc (I am sure it is much cheaper now than when youtube started, but still.)
I do miss those personal blog and website days, it is convenient now to have sites that handle a lot of that now but there’s something uniquely interesting about people setting up their own.
Yes I do. Did you understand the part about video creators being better off before youtube? Did you understand the part about defending something deeply evil “because it gives some people a job”?
Let me check something: do you also think Donald Trump is a good president because he gives good job opportunities to a few lobbyists?
Elle Mills, and content-creators like her, are a source of joy and inspiration and knowledge and strength for millions of people. They are a force for good in the world. If their voices are lost because of business model of their default platform fails to value the very content that makes that platform valuable, that will be a tragedy.
So yeah. You are missing the downside. Perhaps you should watch some of the content and learn about the creators you are implicitly disparaging before passing judgement on their worth.
