In other words, it loses all (human) meaning.
So yes, if you care at all, you shouldn’t “create content”. You should be writing essays, recording tutorials, training, music, conversations, etc. the kind of things you care about, for an audience whose attention you don’t take for granted, hoping that they too will care at least a little. If they do, they will pay you because they will rather part with money than part with your work.
He was being cheeky, but it honestly is how I try and approach most of what I do that isn't directly related to my employment (as a software person).
My blog posts are just for me; I don't market them, I don't expect anyone else to read them, I don't spam links to all my friends every time I post anything.
I have no idea if my writing could make any money in any universe, but since it's not my source of income I don't want to be beholden any kind of "monetization incentives".
That is, losing integrity for the sake of success is what's to be avoided, not success itself.
It's quite interesting how quality of life gets inverted in non intuitive ways. If you travel to a "developing country" you notice you are no longer bombarded with ads. Watching YouTube is close to the premium experience, bc the country presents no ad revenue to Google. You then travel to a "developed" country and you can't watch a 5 minute video without watching 2 ads.
Everything is a transaction, it is too easy to transact. People used to just write, to just make music. Sure, they need to eat, but they lie. You hear people that make insane amouns of money asking for a coffee. imho, writing is a thing you to to share knowledge, to have a conversation, to learn, etc. It is a way to also get people to know you better, and maybe learn about the things you do that they would want to pay for. So unless writing is your full time job, asking money for it leaves a bad taste.
I see you read https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/
It is likely true that he is just there to run a business and feels no sense of pride in its specific offerings, but the accidental honesty was amusing.
How is this any different from a small business hot dog stand, setting up outside a game to get more of the "traffic" instead of paying rent somewhere busy. You're a small business trying to get eyeballs, you do what you gotta do and call it what you want, instead of paying for ads like the big boys.
So then where as a musician does the content go on the internet if it doesn't convert? I feel I'd be better off putting up posters outside venues or some of those roller glue posters on boards in the artsy part of town.
To me "content" means you don't know what you are making or you are very embarrassed about it. We make art or entertainment that people pay for.
In general there are two axis I think about in media. One axis is originality, the other axis is durability. Very unoriginal is a transcription of information everyone already knows. Investigative reporting that reveals new information is very original. A creative story is original.
Durability is how long the thing will have some value. They can put the Wizard of Oz in Sphere today. A Tik Tok video will probably be forgotten in a day or two. You could call that "quality" but that's harder to define and measure.
Value is created in being as original and durable as possible. Platforms want you to be the opposite-- that's the slop they call content.
Paying for access to "content" that isn't capital is a bizarre business model. The only reason it ever existed is because the medium (paper, videotape) was expensive. The smart reason you pay people is because you want them to continue producing, not because you want to continue consuming.
If I have something to say, it's a favor people are doing for me when they read it. In the real world, you beg for people to listen to you.
Influential people already know this. I don't sponsor people who do journalism or write about politics so I can entertain myself. I don't need them to continually convince me of things I already believe, and any entertainment that I get from the uncovering of corruption is prurient. The reason I send them money is so that other people might come to believe what I believe, and so that other people will see the corruption that I disapprove of.
Most other free "content creation" is in fact people advertising themselves as useful capital, hoping to be acquired by other people who think that they can make a profit. "Content creation" is a cargo cult; if you're lucky, 1) somebody sees you as capital and buys you, or 2) somebody else who shares your ability to profit off a related range of content notices you, and you create a mutually beneficial community.
If you're unlucky, you just do random stuff with no object. Or I should say very lucky, because you're already being subsidized by someone else - the proof is that you're eating and not cooking.
There's always been way too much "content," long before the internet. In fact, the internet is currently in the midst of an orgy of content destruction in order to protect capital, while criminals are the ones attempting to preserve and distribute that content.
"You should be writing essays, recording tutorials, training, music, conversations, etc. the kind of things you care about... If they do, they will pay you because they will rather part with money than part with your work"
Is an AI company webcrawler sucking up your novel work, for free, only to goop it out to everyone else without compensating you a dime. And while you worked so hard to genuinely create something, that won't be amplified by internet algorithms so no real human will see it, another person will do a dance or be funny, edgy, unethical, controversial, and get 1000x the human eyeballs, money, and power - probably using AI to write the very words they regurgitate.
It's a sad world after all.
> You should be writing essays, recording tutorials, training, music, conversations, etc. the kind of things you care about, for an audience whose attention you don’t take for granted, hoping that they too will care at least a little. If they do, they will pay you because they will rather part with money than part with your work.
Yeah, that's called content. "the kind of things you care about, for an audience whose attention you don’t take for granted, hoping that they too will care at least a little" doesn't quite roll off the tongue.
It's like your content of love that you produce once or twice a month won't be shown to the users at all.
Where do I get the time after job, family, friends and self-study?
So I don't create content like that at all. I write. And that's all.
But I also want to make videos. The recording, editing timeline is way too high. And then if your stuff is not shown to anybody, that's a huge bummer.
Ice T said it best: "Don't hate the player, hate the game".
I believe lack of social ostracization is one of the reason we find ourselves in current state. Because players are what perpetuates the game.
> using the word as a noun to describe works and communications through which people have expressed themselves adopts an attitude you might rather avoid: it treats them as a commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it disparages all the works by subordinating them to the box that is full.
The alternative is "art" but that comes with a lot of other baggage that often sounds unintentionally pretentious, especially if you aren't actually creating paintings/sculptures/traditional/contemporary studio art. The word creative used to serve a similar purpose, but nowadays I think it sounds both blasé and pretentious.
Yes, content does come with an expectation that you're creating things for an commercial audience; however, I think content is tied to media, and not merely any sort of created object. And so by extension you are participating in the global media sphere by making content, and not just painting for your own enjoyment.
It’s also worth pointing out that while Michelangelo did think of himself as an artist and a sculptor and painter, those professions were basically tradesmen at the time. The concept of high art, in the purely non-economic way we think of today, didn’t come for centuries after his life.
I was hired at a job the very same day Google released their first Panda update[0]. This was the update that nuked all content farmers from search results. It was complete chaos, I sat in an empty cubicle, not knowing if I should stay or leave while the manager cursed and paced. Our ad revenue went from millions to zero, overnight. Unfortunately, they figured out a trick to game google. Which I guess meant I remained employed.
You could make the tackiest, most commercial and derivative musical, but it's still not content because it's just one.
You could make the most eloquent, poetic and inventive podcast in the world, but so long as you are still doing weekly releases (with ads, plus an ad free patreon, of course) it is content.
The tragedy is that we want artists to have reliable income, but the business models, incentives and consumption habits that come with the reliable output to provide that reliable income lead us to the ugliness that people blame on "content".
I have to agree. It is dehumanizing. But, it's unfortunate, because the language of business is the language of business. We have this one. We don't have a separate, identically shaped one, made up of nicer sounding words.
Would be nice if we did, though.
We do though. It is a kind of virtue signaling to use the evil version.
E.g. "Human Resources Department" is called "Personnel Department" in non evil business speak.
To be fair "HR" is going the way of Thermos nowadays though.
I don't think a content creator would naturally describe themselves as a content creator. The word is useful for contexts where you need to generalize over all the different types, but that's not useful when speaking about yourself. So a writer says "I'm a writer", not "I'm a content creator." But writing this paragraph, I needed a word to generalize.
P.S. The closest alternative word might be artist, but it's not quite right--some writers are artists and some aren't.
Did I feel that way because I did not expect the statute to be so large ? The strength displayed to be so soft ? Was there something in the air ?
The only other instance I had of such a feeling was at the Lake Louise, in Alberta (Canada). In both moments, I could remember the thought of seeing something that could not be in any point better than it is.
"Content" implies there is something else, besides content, that is found on the www
It's garbage, not The New Yorker, for example
When data collection, surveilllance and advertising is the sole "business model" then traffic is the business goal, not "content" (The New Yorker does not rely 100% on advertising, it also has subscription revenue)
"Content is king" but it is not an absolute requirement for traffic
That's why "Big Tech" companies are intermediaries (middlemen), they do not need to create "content"
Website operators without content have been buying traffic since the early years of the www
The www is infested with middlemen with no content
They profit from traffic
Content makes good bait for traffic but Big Tech cannot charge subscriptions for it because it isn't theirs; they have to pay for a license
Customer is a much nicer term. Words do matter.
I understand the history behind where that term came from. (The people who were making musical decisions while standing behind the mixing board often were initially producers: people whose job it was to oversee the entire production and coordinate between the musicians, engineers, etc. Then when DJs at discotheques wanted longer versions of songs for dancefloors, remixes were invented. Producers took existing recordings and made longer versions. Then electronic dance music sort of evolved out of that.)
But it still feels like such a soulless term. And most "producers" today are just sitting at home alone with a laptop and Ableton, so the role is very different than it was.
> I feel that all the terms mentioned are useful in specific contexts. Web traffic brings visitors to your resource. If they read your blog, they become readers. If they use your products, they become users. When someone buys something from you, they become a customer.
I'll respectfully disagree. I think those terms make sense if you're talking in general terms, but if you're an individual person talking about your work, they're generic catchall terms with better alternatives.
Like, in concrete terms, let's say I publish funny cartoons on my website and sell prints of those cartoons. It doesn't make sense for me to say "web traffic brings visitors to my resource." What traffic? What resource? It would be more meaningful to say, "Visitors find my website through Google search."
On one side, I think that those who manage to generate a trusted audience can benefit from this as LLMs generate generic content.
On the other side, people could get so used to generic content — like Tik-Toks — that it will only be a handful of people coming to those generating thoughtful content.
The way I use video is unlikely to be completely taken over by AI. Sure, producers might use some AI along the way, but people will continue valuing genuine programming, be it educational, comedy, news etc.
But I expect the second kind of content, the one you search for, to be mostly consumed by AI video and AI summaries as time goes on.
It's a good man who can bring home the sculpture that his wife likes at the end of his workday.
But why does it have to be him, and his wife, and a sculpture.
Surely the merit is in the person who brings the content that their partner likes, no matter where or when, or what.
It's a bit depressing watching language get shallow …
> I've never created content, I've written things down. > I've never created content, I've said things out loud. > I've never created content, I've recorded a video. > I've never created content, I've shown someone around. > I've never created content, I've pointed something out.
In other scenarios the non "corp-speak" term feels kind of wrong and the "corp-speak" one is actually better though. I feel like this is all just a realization about what the goal of the business actually is and a realization of just how many different goals you could have. In this case it sounds like it's just to do some good writing, not to grow for the sake of making more money or whatever else. And that makes a huge difference in how you talk about it of course.
Also if someone used the word "lead" I'd conclude that they... work in sales? How can that mean anything about whether they'll be helpful to you or not?
Ok one more thought: sometimes the corp-speak feels way less stuck up than "oh actually, I'm a writer. I measure progress not from other people being willing to pay me some money, but in terms of my own highly refined taste. I have many leather-bound books, and..."
(Reminds me of https://theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesn...)
I don't really have anything against the existence of the catchall term "content." Like, I don't expect the CEO of YouTube to say, "music, short film, art, comedy, journalism, ..., creators" every time he talks about YouTube users. It makes sense from their perspective to bucket everything into "content."
The thing I found interesting was just that the language had crossed over to people where it doesn't make sense to bucket everything. If I'm a blogger, I can just say "blogger" and it's more meaningful than "content creator" but I think the people running small businesses or doing creative work have needlessly adopted the big bucket terminology of "content."
It's called "Stewart Lee: Content Provider" and its hilarous.
The stronger you feel about it and the more you seem to enjoy sharing your opinions on it, the less interesting you become.
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--
I could not resist playing this game of words...
I wish somebody could motivate me to publish them anyway.
You could make a plausible conspiracy theory that this was why so much capital was invested to develop generative AI: Maybe the holy grail of tech CEOs wasn't AGI, it was a web full of content without those annoying content creators...
And this isn't to say that "content creation" is any less valid than "creating art". There are plenty of "content creators" who know exactly what they are making at the end of the day (a product) and don't hide that fact or try to dress it up under the pretense of being anything more.
There's slop, and there's masterpiece. In which would you rather invest your time? (Either creating or 'consuming'?)
Ie. If you see yourself as a 'content creator' then the best you're going to be is a slop merchant. If you see yourself as an author or a writer then you at least have a chance at being a real artist, like Michaelangelo.
It uses lots of words to make it's point which, for me, smacks of 'content' (I was expecting there to be a recipe at the end). They haven't stopped 'creating content' but they're attempting to stop calling it that.
That's what I got out of it anyway. But then again I may just be salty that I'm not also a Don Draper (slop merchant).
The first section did a great job of grabbing my attention. It feels like these days, all creative works are lumped together as "content", anything not brand-new and bleeding-edge is labelled "legacy" (I see this more on HN than anywhere), and everything is distilled down to "engagement" and "conversions".
I hate business buzzword-jargon, the corporate in-group lingo, and I've also always disliked this use of the word "content". It's too generic - we might as well be calling it "stuff".
As a child, I used to notice that there were some other kids who, upon hearing a word that was new to them, would immediately start using it incessantly, replacing the (sometimes richer) choice of words they'd thus far been brought up to use. Very often wrongly, by slightly misunderstanding the meaning, the context, or the word itself, and never checking first. It was clear how the choice of words used, or even the meaning of words, could subtly change within a small group. As I grew older I realised these people appeared to be in the majority, and that it showed how, via various methods of trying to sound clever or in-group signalling, changes in speech patterns spread out across the larger population.
Anyway that's my view, now I'll go back to yelling at clouds.
I stopped reading at this sentence and couldn't take the rest of the article seriously. It felt .... pretentious and self centered.
"They content create, I despise that; I create content, then they tries that.."
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That’s not what it means. It means that the vendor and you are a good fit for each other. The hard part in almost all these things is that two parties would both benefit if they had common knowledge but they don’t have common knowledge. The guy who puts the two together is useful. That’s who you describe as “sending great leads”.
It’s not clear to me why this style of manufactured grievance writing is popular. The world is full of Pareto wins.
But ya, now that I see nine_k's comment, option makes a lot of sense.
Elm took this a little to far.
[1] however you choose to define "best"
I wonder whether one could say the same about Zig these days. The maintainers conspicuously avoid to employ the usual methods for popularizing a new language that others seem to take for granted. Although I'm not (yet?) a user of Zig, I rather enjoy this different approach where quality (in the maintainers' view) outweighs quantity.
I also write software for free, but it’s not a cry in the dark. It’s serious, ship-grade software, released into the App Store, and used by thousands.
It’s just not designed to make money.
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I also think that the Cambrian explosion age of FOSS will soon be over, now that well compensated software engineers are a dying breed.
It's not something that exists simply because software developers had free time to waste.
FOSS is now mostly sponsored by commercial enterprises. The part that isn't sponsored is dying or has died. Linux was a silly project by one guy, where are projects like that now?
(This takes a lot of pressure off - I publish notes, half-finished thoughts, stuff I'll "get around to later" with no shame).
Granted, being uninteresting has never really stopped me from writing long comments on HN...
Payment fatigue is an irrational thing, at least in the context of what a rational economic agent is. Rationally, you pay for what you value, at roughly what it is valued to you, and you don't pay for you want you don't value. Transactions are fatiguing precisely because we are not rational agents. Humans live primarily on emotion and ingrained behavior, with small bursts of applying logic.
In general, the "rational agent" abstraction is so flexible it can represent almost any real-world behaviour (which is why it's a bad model, not that humans are fundamentally irrational in some way).
Back in the day, computer games were paid once. Or if you had a pack. Now, it is a series of $1-$2 small sales for thing here and there.
And I could go on. It is tiring. I think payment fatigue is very much a rational thing.
Then again I suppose there's also an opposite sunk-cost effect where a fan feels obliged to insincerely say how great the thing is, because of being literally invested in it.
This again reminds me of the Telecom New Zealand rebranding. They changed their name from Telecom (meaningful) to Spark (maximally meaningless) and their logo from the word Telecom with a pair of wires passing through the O, to a Claude-esque generic inkblot (maximally meaningless). It gives the impression it got taken over by new management who have no idea what the company actually does, which is probably true.
People want value whereas platforms want content, the incentives between a viewer and platform/content creator are getting broken because of the overhead incentive of the platform/content creator for money aka content.
There are some places where its not the case, namely wikipedia (aside from its recent controversies) and archive.org both being non-profit, though there are issues with non-profits as well in terms of their funding and other things. Open source being the example of it in terms of how much value it gives us but there is a lack of funding of that as well.
There has to be some balance in all of it but it seems that the balance is binary-like. Either we are seeing mostly open source underfunded software or we are seeing platforms/content-creators using their power for more money.
It also comes to the point that GP comment makes though, content is created by the expectation of profit and so that is its benchmark but value is created for something more emotional but people also like to eat food and would prefer to do so doing work on open source/the work they like for example but then it also pushes itself into content boundary rather than value.
@tombert has a comment about it which says that they are writing blogs and creating value for the sake of it because they have job on the side and its just the first example that I got reading this thread but many people actually create value as such, but as such they are creating value "in-spite" of incentives and the actual incentives are working on the opposite side of value creation.
It is similar to how actual Musicians in music industry are really exploited by all the systems around them yet they still create Music (value) in-spite of all of it because creating music (value) means more to them than all the issues and there is something human about creating value/music. Here's an extremely good video about it[0]
if money follows content and content follows money, perhaps content is just value which follows money and being shallow rather than something deeper and all these dynamics that interact with each other are leading to a tug of war in the first place.
I've said this a long time. I also don't want to be "gilding the lily": if someone makes plenty of money making the "content" I like, I would like to redirect my contribution to marginal work, something nice that almost doesn't get made. There should not be "content" multimillionaires, that's a failure of our collective incentive structures.
Stuff Made Here
Bobby Fingers
Boy Boy
Michael Reeves
..to name a few off the top of my head
(Of course, theses are mostly HUGE channels)
In my view, you don't get to dismiss LLMs as "stochastic parrots" unless you can argue with precisely defined terms why you ain't one.
Reading this article a few years ago was extremely influential for me, as I had been feeling awkward for a while about how we (authors and videomakers) have been going from "sharing actionable information and advice" to feeding the platforms so we can get crumbs from their monetization efforts.
There are top-shelf authors that insist on writing everything in cursive, in legal pads (God help the poor schlubs that have to transcribe it, though). They insist that they can’t be creative, otherwise. There are musicians (like Rhiannon Giddens), that always perform barefoot.
Most of the Great Masters could work in many mediums, and they chose specific media, to do specific works, because they knew that the medium would “push back,” and inform the work.
Michelangelo was quoted as saying something like he “saw the statue in the stone,” and that was why selecting the rock was as important as any other part of the process.
Many folks take great pains, to do their work in specific contexts, as that affects their creativity.
Creativity isn’t something that is easy to commoditize.
Also, I really like your artwork! I've bookmarked that link.
Everyone's so terrified that they might stand out.
My friends use my stuff all the time, and they are always gobsmacked, when they find out I did it.
I do it for free, and tend to follow my own muse, as opposed to $_BUZZWORD_DU_JOUR, so tech folks aren’t really impressed, when I mention it (like, now, I suspect).
It’s not really very rewarding to talk about it. Either people get all impressed, or insulting (the typical HN reaction). Neither does much for me, so I’m best off just keeping my mouth shut, and my mind on my work. There’s others that are much better than me. I’m just grateful to be able to Give Back.
That’s not pretension; it’s just facts. But there’s often no need to mention the facts.
That you?
Cool.
> The alternative is "art"
That's how you read the term. Unfortunately, for most of your potential viewers, "content" is "art" but commissioned by the ton, like beef.
> The alternative is "art"
Maybe. Or alternative could be to use the words you used in your first sentence: writer, photographer, filmmaker.
If you talk about your work using deflationary words like content then that could affect how you think about it and present it. Do yourself a favor and use grand words because I bet it's important to you.
I don't particularly like the term "content creator". It feels too blunt and sterile to be particularly useful. But it does seem to be generally useful in how wide-reachingly descriptive it is.
Being a musician has nothing to do with the output of working with wood, and likewise, my prowess on gouges, chisels, and saws is irrespective of my ability to write an interesting chord progression. Using a catch-all term to amalgamate the output of multiple specializations I think detracts from the results being, well... special.
Just my .02c
Though, I will admit that I never include cooking in that. Food, for some reason, has never felt, to me, like "content". Can't say I've ever interrogated why.
If nothing else, this blog post certainly invites scrutiny over how much feelings affect what classifications feel comfortable.
I know there's a big bias against 'business speak' among engineers. But a lot of the time, it's just a matter of abstracting in a domain engineers typically don't work in. It's useful to describe from the 'business' point-of-view since terms like this can be used to analyze the similarities across these similar 'content creation' type businesses.
I'm trying to think of a similar case where to an outsider, the 'tech speak' jargon a software engineer would use seems useless to an outsider. Maybe things like 'framework', or 'deployment', or 'library', or web application instead of web site.
Like it doesn’t fit podcasts at all really.
From about 1998-2008 I ran one of the largest sites on the internet for a particular niche. Zero advertisers, no ads, no shady links, just content about a subject I loved. I worked hard to make sure it was accurate and up to date. Now someone creating the same site would be loads of referral links or paid ads, so no trust whatsoever in what’s being presented.
I get a similar ick when I hear someone say "I enjoy consuming this type of content." They're not selling anything, but they are still adopting the soulless language. Like, if it still exists after you interact with it, you haven't consumed anything. Second, do you really see yourself this way? Why not just say "I love to read travel blogs"?
Device is a handy one though you often want to say "computer, laptop, tablet or phone" in one go. We could call them all computers but that would confuse people I think.
These words are sometimes like schrodingers cat and this is also what I have observed that within recent layoffs, its really hard to accurately find what the real intent behind it was within some companies and there is no wide consensus.
Perhaps this is their true purpose, to hide the real intent behind things and perhaps (to give the benefit of doubt?)
By the 1990s, it had largely withdrawn from its earlier manufacturing role to "branding" products made largely in Taiwan. Its manufacturing "partner" learned the design and the business, and eventually took over the marketing role itself. The new (foreign) brand exists, and is relatively well-known, the century-plus original ... was sold in bankruptcy auction in the early aughts and ... surprise to me, actually continues on as a "brand".
What I've noticed as well are two common trends:
Many well-known brands, particularly in appliances, sell products which are all but certainly produced by whitebox manufacturers in China, with the "brand" literally an adhesive label slapped on at the end. There's not even enough trust in the relationship to weld or stamp the name onto the goods. Often times those badges will fall off after a few months....
Increasingly I see goods with no manufacturer indication at all. Ceramics, electronics, household goods, and the like. There may have been some sort of adhesive label, but there's no permanent branding or marking that will remain on the device.
I'm hardly the most brand-aware or brand-loyal person out there, but I did come of age in an environment where the marketing philosophy was "brand is king". After decades of rebadging goods from independent manufacturers, even the pretense of branding's significance no longer seems to exist, in many cases.
Money.
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I'd suppose that blog writers and video producers have a lot of the same kinds of business problems: how people can discover [the thing they create] and spread awareness of it or make money off it.
In order to be able to discuss this category of business, it's useful for writers and video producers to be able to relate to each other by abstracting out the thing that actually makes them distinct and particular.
I see it less as devaluing that special thing and more as a lens to put on or take off when certain audiences are interested in the 'non-special' aspects of running businesses based on that special thing.
But it does not.
Whatever you call it, I participate to find out if it’s crap or not.
If artists create art that people are willing to pay for, great!
I don't really want to pay artists for art I don't like.
I remember when Nirvana suddenly became successful. Many in the local community called them "sellouts", which is quite unfair.
But the way the internet (and other mass media) scales means that only the latter can really have a business model and reliable income attached.
1. buy a Lambo, then get it reposessed
2. save/invest on the peaks
What makes you think it's AI-generated?
Some 'content creators' might also do: videos, blog posts, photographs, tweets, and a lot of other activity that drives the same business: getting user 'engagement' for sponsorship or advertising revenue.
I'm not trying to argue that art is sacred and we have to hold it up over everything else, but I am joking that there is still an implicit boundary where we don't use "content" to refer to things that we respect highly.
I think a lot of people that talk about "art" vs. "content" are talking about art vs. business, but I'm more arguing about big vs. small and aggregation vs. individuality.
It makes sense for YouTube and Twitter and Facebook to refer to everything on the Internet as "content" because there's so much variety and those platforms are trying to capture all of it. But I just realized it's silly for me, an individual author to refer to my work as "content" when I could just as easily say "book" or "blog posts."
> I just realized it's silly for me, an individual author to refer to my work as "content" when I could just as easily say "book" or "blog posts."
Which, I believe, was the intention.
Sometimes when I'm thinking about a blog post, I fall in love with a joke I want to use, but then it constrains how I think about the topic. I still like the David example, but I'm too close to the post to have a balanced perspective, just having finished it today.
Paintings, sculptures, blog posts, HN comments, etc. are all examples of different things that can be reductively viewed as "content" by those who only want to exploit them for profit, just like the illustration shows. I don't think the article is saying that these things are all the same.
The Thriller album is more popular, but I like Off The Wall better.
There are people who play synthesisers live, whether on a keyboard with a pre-set patch, or a modular synthesizer making experimental sounds. I'd call them musicians with only a little hesitation. But if they do it offline and record it? Less sure.
Also, is Taylor Swift a musician?
If only for her being a singer, I don't see how she _wouldn't_ be a musician
> But I did notice an immediate change, especially with words like “traffic.” Traffic makes me feel like I’m just throwing out flypaper and measuring whatever sticks. When I describe website visitors as “readers,” it reminds me that these are real people who have literally billions of other things they could be reading that day, but they’re choosing to spend some of their limited time with me.
Who gets kicked out?
(Sorry to use a meme but I couldn't drop this oddly perfect opportunity. Also Kane Parsons is 21 years old)
Are you interested in living in a world where nobody can make a living off of their creative work?
Even if the output is free, you might enjoy the community, the gratitude or other indirect rewards.
I'm having trouble understanding where we disagree. It seems like you're arguing that she's correct because it was helpful for the mutual acquaintance to refer me to this vendor, which I agree it is.
My point is that the term "lead" implies that she's thinking about making the sale rather than serving me as her client. Do we disagree about the connotation of the word "lead?"
As a more extreme example, if you went to a doctor for an illness and they said, "Wow, I'm going to make so much money treating you," I imagine you'd find it off-putting even if the doctor would only earn the money because they're doing a useful thing by treating your illness.
Naturally the grievance writing style pre-supposes extractive malice “oh the dermatologist is happy because they’re going to make money off me” rather than the more mundane “oh the dermatologist is happy because they don’t have to spend this time telling me they can’t help me”.
In any case, far be it from me to tell you not to do this. As a content creator, you have certainly found writer-audience fit. It baffles me why, but this style is certainly popular on this website.
To me, if someone describes me as a "lead," it implies that they are focused on making the sale rather than on anything else about the business relationship. I would also find it unsettling if a doctor told me that I was a "good lead" because I had a disease they treat.
Consider for the moment the two cases of an agent for a player or actor and a doctor. It’s normal for an agent to discuss commission and for a doctor to not, though both will make money off you participating. If you had an agent who said he’s just trying to get you the best deal and “don’t worry about money” that would also trigger red flags as much as a doctor discussing commission rates for referrals.
That doesn’t mean commissions are worse than undiscussed rates. Just that norm-violators are risky deal participants.
Given this discussion, I suspect the best interpretation of your post is not that it is grievance text. It is that unfamiliarity with the terminology of a field has resulted in transferring connotations from unrelated contexts.
To lighten the tone, I am reminded of a HN comment where someone said that “Khan Academy” was a terrible name because it naturally brings to mind a “con man”. Of course, this must have been natural because the two words are homophones in his accent (they are not so in mine). An example of connotation mistaken.
I love Haskell, I've spent a lot of time in the general area around functional programming, types, proofs and PL, and there is still a vibrant community with lots of amazing non-commercial projects there. I'm sure the same is true in other areas of the programming world.
Ditto for the Emacs world. Emacs and its package ecosystem are amazing, better than they've ever been, and ≈entirely driven by non-commercial work.
Same for a big chunk of NixOS, although there's also been some real commercial investment there now.
I never really thought about it before writing this comment, but, except for games, most of the software I use and care about is primarily community-driven rather than commercial. And it's absolutely great.
Despite smaller communities and low monetary investment, a remarkable number of things about Haskell and Emacs and Nix are simply better than any commercial alternative, full stop.
The problem isn't that this kind of software has died—it's thriving more than ever—but just that the rest of the field has grown around it even faster. Programming is so commercially valuable that there has been a ton of investment in it and now we have millions of people for whom it's just a career, and trillions of dollars pouring into companies powered, primarily, by programming. It's a wild time. The overall feel of the field is definitely different now, but you can still find classic hacker enclaves. You just have to cut through the noise first.
The media of creation, and the media of consumption.
Valid discussion.
Good ol’ HN.
Have a great day!
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-divisional_form>
Outside the US you'll find Chaebol (Korea) and Keiretsu / Zaibatsu (Japan) models.