Ditto. I have had tons of dental work. Fire up the iPod, and yes I still use a old iPod Nano for walks and dental work so I can be distraction-free. Toss in some nitrous and it is almost a pleasurable experience. I certainly don't dread going to the dentist.
Back in the day the internet for normal people was 3 bucks a hour over a 14,400 modem. I didn't consider myself a "creator" for posting my recipes for making mashed potatoes in a crock pot. I just wanted to make the world have better mashed potatoes. I did it for free. There was no "like" button or comments or monetization. Just this nerd and a crock pot and a gross amount of butter. That is not a joke. I had a crock pot cooking site. I didn't have a counter or anything. Maybe it was popular.. I will never know.
The internet was pretty great when it was just people sharing info without looking for a advertising partnership with Land 'O Lakes.
The internet was pretty great when it was just people sharing info without looking for a advertising partnership with Land 'O Lakes.
It's all very well lamenting the Good Old Days of the web when the content was free and the adverts were few as if it's disappeared but it really hasn't. There are thousands of people making content and publishing it to Instagram, YouTube, and various recipe websites and blogs every day. They do it for the love of publishing their thoughts. People still do that.
Two other things are different now though.
Firstly, our expectations changed. Unless someone is an "influencer" or a "thought leader" many people deem them not to be worth their time. We have a measure of quality and anything that falls below it gets ignored (or even ridiculed.)
Secondly, we stopped searching for content. Today people don't search the web for content. They go to a website where an algorithm curates "the best mashed potato recipes ever" in to a playlist or a listicle for them. It's not surprise at all that's the content produced by professional content marketing companies, and it's the stuff that has adverts on it.
>There are thousands of people making content and publishing it to Instagram, YouTube, and various recipe websites and blogs every day.
I really don't think that it's possible given the engineering of those platforms. They are literally spending millions, if not billions, of dollars on addiction technology. To think that an individual can overcome that is naive and hubristic.
Perhaps there wouldn't be so many "content creators" if tech/the Internet hadn't destroyed their livelihoods over the past 20+ years. Authors, journalists, photographers, the list goes on and on.
"I wish people just made content for free" comments always seem to come from people with comfortable, secure incomes and careers.
That may perhaps be because some of the best content also comes from people with comfortable, secure incomes and careers.
When people create content they are passionate about for a living, they a) often quickly lose that passion, and b) are more willing to compromise on the quality of their content in order to turn more profit (often through no fault of their own, but as a result of the exploitative nature of most content platforms).
A lot of brilliant content just requires more time or investment than someone with a day job has. And arguably, creating content alongside a 40 hour job is a compromise on quality itself.
Plenty of famous writers started out holding odd jobs to make ends meet.
Kurt Vonnegut sold cars, John Grishman worked at a nursery watering bushes, George Orwell was a police officer in Burma, Herman Melville was a cabin boy, T.S. Eliot was a banker, Philip Glass was a plumber and a taxi driver, Richer Serra was a furniture remover, Rothko was an elementary school teacher, Ai WeiWei did street portraits, house painting and carpentry, Keith Haring was a busboy at a night club, the same club where Madonna worked as a coat-check girl, Paul Gauguin was a stockbroker, Jackson Pollock was a babysitter, Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, gas pump attendant and worker at an industrial laundry...
I could go on...
And for every of those names there are plenty of anonymous artists who produced awesome work which never attained the same level of widespread impact on mainstream culture.
As Vonnegut would write: so it goes.
See, digital technology seemingly lowered the bar to reach an audience of millions. It largely has cut out the middle man, the distributor. However, so many young content creators discover now that content doesn't create itself. It still takes time and effort to produce anything worthwhile.
Moreover, artistic or creative freedom is only within reach if you are able to attain financial independence. Or, more succinctly put, someone is willing to pay your living expenses for your privilege to create whatever. Usually that only happens if you find a wealthy philanthropist or patron. And usually, these are people who support budding artists for the sole purpose of showing that their wealth and power is so massive that they can.
Your other option, as creator or artist, is to live as frugally and - hopefully - make smart financial decisions. Like, try and work part time, apply for grants and public funding, try to do work on commission, freelancing,... All in hopes that your work and your name, at long last, gets valued on the market to make a proper living income... which, essentially, is just as much a risky proposition as quitting a job and getting into the start up game.
If you have an artistic vision and you want to execute that vision by pouring in all your time into it, well, you also have to be prepared to face the challenges and consequences that come with that desire. So, you better make sure it's something you genuinely want for yourself.
I always find it odd that historical arguments are rejected for basically everything - imagine arguing against social security because it didn't exist historically, or for indentured servitude because it did - and yet the exact same line of thought is used against arts and culture, which are ostensibly some of the most important products of a civilization.
Instead, the trope is "well too bad, if you want to be an artist, pay for it yourself." And you wonder why a television reality star is the president of the country...if you don't invest in the arts, what else do you expect to happen?
To be clear, my point wasn't to put the responsibility entirely with the creators. It was about showing that if you reduce the discussion to "How can we get more people to donate/subscribe/like? We need some centralized platform with cutting edge tech to do it!" you're losing out in many ways, and you ignore a massive amount of murky, complex, long standing, socio-economic dynamics.
I tried skirting that last remark myself because it evokes strong emotions and tends to derail any meaningful discussion about this.
On a personal note, I think it's absolutely important that there's public funding for the arts, humanities and non-profit in general. But by the same token, it's fair to state that you can't expect society - a large group of individuals - to support anyone who starts producing and publishing content on social media full time, without question.
Maybe we should all accept that nobody has to be a journalist (or content creator) and that most of journalism is actually pretty useless trash.
Nobody promised you to “this single mother had been making money from her living room for the past 10 years - click here to learn how to do that, too”
For example, you don’t need a human being dramatising the situation is a third-world country, you just need to learn a few new pieces of news from there. This is why I read newspapers - not for their opinion pieces.
And why does this apply to journalism and not other pretty useless trash like BTC or ad sales or stock price speculation or content marketing or most local and national politics or startups that only sell gourmet pet food?
The irony is that if someone pitched the old newspaper and print magazine model as a startup today - thought leaders, high quality fact-checked journalism, commercial independence but solid relationships with advertisers - it would be branded incredibly exciting and disruptive.
Of course this applies to all those things as well. And we even have very similar threads about other topics -- like "is SEO evil" or "should we adblock"
Advertisement have always paid for most of journalism. If the equivalent of classified ads magically vanished from the internet, there would be a rebirth of small newspapers, and the big ones would become much healthier.
That's cool, but I want people to be able to independently create content for me to enjoy, which is a bit less of a crock. That will probably takes all their time and they need to pay for ingredients for their pot. Bring on universal basic income I guess.
In my experience professionalising content creation (on youtube) hardly helps quality.
Usually they end up filming their cooking lessons hanging the latest Canon from a drone in their Dubai studio kitchen with nothing substantial left to say. Maybe people will stick around because they are still able to afford to outspend other creators on exotic ingredients and they're just looking for a familiar face to entertain them. I'm not familiar with cooking channels, but you'll see a lot of 'professional' music teachers on youtube eventually making an 'A=432 Hz' video. It's downright tragic how the urge to publish takes a hold of them.
They also usually will become clowns. Since people will stick around for the entertainment rather than educational value, I've seen a lot of professional content creators trying way too hard to be casual and approachable, incorporating idiosyncrasies and bloopers on purpose, then making fun of them. Eventually their video thumbnails will be them actually making funny faces.
It doesn't always have to be like that, and I'm not judging you for enjoying their content, just be aware that in the age of youtube you're soon dealing with basically corporations who couldn't care what they're selling, as long as they can keep selling it.
But there is already more excellent content that has already been created than you could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes. Do we really need to support people to create more? I feel like we can enjoy what we already have and don't need to continuously look for something new. If people really really really want to create something, they will find a way to do so.
> there is already more excellent content that has already been created than you could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes.
I hear this often. Where is this excellent content? 99% of things online recommendations float up for me is garbage. Sometimes I see some gems, but it's rare. Already years ago I was hearing people say that the only thing we need now is good content discovery. Screw any new content. We already have too much good stuff.
I'm starting to think that, if in all this time Internet giants haven't been able come up with a way to get to those hundreds of lifetimes of amazing content, maybe it doesn't actually exist?
Our tastes change over time. Some things that were great 10 years ago haven't aged well. There's a long tail. What's excellent for you isn't interesting to me, and so on. In a sum there might be more content than you can watch in a lifetime, but an intersection of that whole collection with a single person's momentary interests seems to be much much smaller.
Have you really read the entire Western Canon? Listened to the collective oeuvres of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart? Watched the AFI top 100 movies or IMDB’s top 1000? Watched all of The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad? Read the SF Masterworks Collection?
Is there any kind of cultural production, any genre that you like a lot more than most people? Because if there is there’s someone who likes it 100 times more than you and has made a list of the top 100 things in it. If you haven’t gone through multiple of these lists then you you’re not even trying to get through the enormous amount of fantastic content out there that is wildly disproportionately likely to be great, for you.
You underestimate how specific people's tastes can be. There are nano niches. For example what if I like the music of a person so much that I'd rather listen to that person for 100 hours than to anything else? Well, that's exactly what I'm doing but when the author has only ever published 12 songs each 3 min long then that means I've heard the songs over a hundred times already and unfortunately at some point I just get bored of a song. I wish I could enjoy them longer but for me it would be just as good if the same author released a new batch of songs.
You no longer enjoy that person’s music so much that you would rather listen to it than do anything else. It seems unlikely that all of your interests are so specific. If you have some more general tastes there will be lists of good stuff you should check out in those genres. If you love these 12 songs more than acting else but have listened to them so much that all joy has drained from them have you listened to songs others with taste recommend for those who love these songs?
Artistic taste is far from infinitely malleable but it’s flexible enough for many to appreciate metal, opera, pop and classical music. If your tastes are so narrow and specific you are in a tiny minority.
I understand the enjoyment of collecting stuff or completing lists compiled by other people, but that isn't connected to what I enjoy about art, so I'm still not finding this a fun suggestion.
Per this reasoning, producing The Wire or Breaking Bad and most of the "Western Canon" was already unnecessary. Humanity has produced enough written content in antiquity to keep you reading for a lifetime.
Yes, and? My point wasn’t about cultural production, it was about the availability of enormous amounts of excellent curated content. People will make art of various forms without remuneration, even without audience, for the love of creation. Greater rewards will lead to more. But there really is enough great work in antiquity to spend a lifetime on.
With that reasoning we should have stopped producing music after Bach, Mozart or Beethoven. Instead, our cultural context and technology evolved and so did our forms of expression. There will always be more possibilities and combinations of known elements (ingredients, words, notes, interesting questions) that nobody has tried before. Be it in the realm of cooking, music, programming, podcasting or literature -- the possibilities are (almost) endless. If I find pleasure consuming that content I have no problem rewarding those that produce it -- and I would never be able to produce such content / will find a way to do so. I am a reasonably good programmer and cook, but a pretty crappy musician -- I would never be able to produce musical content like Amon Tobin, Aphex Twin or Black Sabbath.
But... they can do exactly that. You can whip up a few pages in HTML with pictures and put on Github or shared hosting. Heck, you can even use a publishing platform like WordPress if you're not technically inclined. Each time you use your pot for a family dinner, you jot down the recipe and you publish it. Boom: you've created content!
So, what's the problem then?
It's how the goalpost for defining success have shifted. You're only successful if you are a full time writer of crock pot recipes, and you can leverage your content as a jumping board for wider fame. Which means you spend your days in the kitchen, churning out recipes, you market your content, you strike a branding deal with a crock pot manufacturer, etc. etc. etc.
This is an impossible and unrealistic standard. It's also the standard by which influencers, streamers, Instagram models and so on hold themselves and each other.
The other implied assumption here is that a source on crock pot cooking is only reliable if supported by a professional expert who does just that full time. But if you use this bar to assess quality of content, you risk missing really valuable and great crock pot information out there. Moreover, that expert? Maybe they are paid to push a brand of expensive crock pots; whereas the next hobby cook does the exact same thing in a pot that costs a quarter of the price.
"Oh! But creative creators ought to be paid for their hard work!"
Tough luck. This was a challenge long before the Web was conceived. Few artists, painters, writers, playwrights, sculptors,... were financially independent. Either they were wealthy themselves (nobility,...), or they were lucky to work for wealthy patrons (historically, patronage was a way to display power). Plenty of creators scraped - and are scraping - by with odd jobs. Plenty of now famous writers had other means of income at the start of their careers.
Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, was manager of a Saab dealership, a public relations officer for GE and volunteer fire fighter. Harper Lee was a reservation clerk at Eastern Airlines while she wrote in her spare time, until her friends gave her, aged 30, a note on Christmas 1956: "You have a year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas." They all had pitched in and gifted her a year's wages. That's what allowed her to write To Kill A Mockingbird.
So, when you look at the body of famous artists, and how things worked out for them, you want to be aware of survivor bias.
Sure, UBI would support many more creative endeavours such as they are. But it's no silver bullet. If anything, there's this prevailing idea that it's somehow easy, and preferable, to make a full time, financially independent living by publishing digital content (text, video,...) on the Web. This is a gross overestimation of what the Web can do for you. It just creates unrealistic expectations and sets people, especially young people, up for disappointment if it doesn't work out.
By no means does that mean one shouldn't be creating content and publishing on the Web. But please do it for the right reasons: because it's something you deeply enjoy doing above all anything else.
That's nice, but this thread isn't about you then.
I'm following creators whose content takes days of research and making. They're not greedy for wanting to monetize this work, they just need to earn a living sometime.
While not nearly as bad as what is in the article. Predictive text in Messages on iOS now suggests "cancer" when I type "can" and "chemotheteropy" when I type "ch". And to really rub it in "ma" brings up "magnesium". The magnesium one being the worst because if I type it that means they are doing a magnesium infusion and that means I am going to feel like I have been hit by a truck for the next two days.
A lot of the times it is actually picking the right word but somethings you don't want to be constantly reminded of.
I get that this is frustrating and deeply annoying for you, but these predictions are analyzed and made on-device. There is no tracking going on like in the case of Facebook (where it could leak through another Cambridge-Analytica-like event to many other companies).
I was really into skateboarding from about 12 years old to 30. But back in the day I used to buy the Sony Sport Walkman's. The big yellow ugly ones.
When I would skate I had the Walkman in my left hand at all times. I used to fall a lot and learned to land on the Walkman. It became instinct to cover my glasses with my right forearm and land with my left hand so the Walkman took the hit. For anyone wondering my fingers didn't grip all the way around the Walkman so I didn't grind my fingernails off when I landed.
But those things were tanks. I bought the OG 5GB iPod when it came out and that completely changed the way I skated since I didn't have the trusty Walkman to fall on.
But that was also around the time I started to listen to more Hip Hop like Slick Rick so my entire style changed to a smoother more technical skate compared to when I was listening to Reagan Youth all day and just flinging myself off sets of stairs.
When I was getting my woodshop going I was hitting up estate sales/auctions. There was one I auction I scored a nearly brand new SawStop table saw, Dewault planer, and ShopFox joiner (kinda crap) for under 600 dollars. All the stuff was pretty much brand new.
I have hit the point where I have more tools than space.
My main beef with the roku is the sluggishness of the UI. And I have a few of them in the house (ultras or whatever the top of the line one was as of six months ago. Amazon had a sale and I bought a few). I also have a bunch of Apple TV 4Ks.
Say I am watching Plex and then want to switch to Netflix and then maybe go over to Channels to watch some News on MSNBC. The Apple TV can do this without reloading the app or losing my place in the video. It is nearly instant. The Roku has to reload the entire app taking a minute and losing my place.
Interesting. I have the 4K Apple TV and sometimes apps feel extremely sluggish. Netflix clearly has some sort of compounding problem (maybe a memory leak) where simply scrolling through the app gets progressively slower until it’s nearly completely unusable. Killing and restarting the app fixes it temporarily.
I haven't noticed that in Netflix. But 80% of my use of the Apple TV is plex and a little app I wrote that reads directories on my computer running Apache and shows everything in a directory structure. And a bash script that runs through everything calling HandBrakeCli (if needed), generates thumbnails with ffmpeg, and then creates the xml.js file the app reads.
It took around six hours to build and I had zero experience with any tvos or ios development. Just a fun covid-project.
Sluggishness switching apps? Probably a result of supporting a lot of very low-end devices. I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of their active devices in the field have very poor specs. And probably cost less than $100 when originally purchased—often way less. You’re not getting a bunch of fast SSD memory to suspend programs to, nor enough RAM to keep several open, on that kind of budget.
The CEO of Roku said in an interview on a podcast that their goal is to keep the build of materials needed to run the software under $25 for the TV manufacturers.
They do a damn good job. Sure opening an app takes a few seconds and apps tend not to do much to save and restore state when re-opened (the app developers could do more of that, if they cared to) but the experience in any given app is usually pretty smooth and snappy, considering what it's running on. It's a testament to how good UI can be even on fairly low-end hardware when you're not fundamentally screwing up performance, repeatedly, over several levels of abstraction.
On one hand, for a smart TV platform, there are a lot of positives. First and foremost it’s Switzerland. It’s neutral and everything is available for it - amazingly enough even AppleTV. As you said, the interface isn’t bad given the hardware constraints, and they support their hardware as long as feasible. I had a few Roku boxes back in 2011. I have three Roku TVs and will probably have two more by the end if the year. I also bought my dad one.
On the other hand, I hate the ads that take up half the screen and the hard coded buttons. The UI is decent, but not as responsive as my AppleTV 4K.
Our first streaming device was a Fire Stick. Talk about sluggish. Wow. We replaced it with a 2017 Nvidia Shield TV (even though we're an Apple house, go figure). Much better.
https://i.imgur.com/3sVDwhQ.png
https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/unbound/