Despite the length and effort of this video, this is not an attempt at creating a magnum
opus. Far from it, it is a cathartic mess designed to cap off my first year of Youtube
while also indirectly and incompletely chronicling my experience with platforms, attention economies,
and the desire to be recognized in my works. It is, largely, an effort of practical explanation
mired in anecdote, to which I provide a smaller companion, more expressly telling My Youtube
Story and sharing my feelings on the state of things.
This will be a journey, from a made-up website to places monetizing creativity to a ridiculous
cryptocurrency project, into the past- and a glance to the future.
It is, despite this, still an essay with a thesis:
The monetization of creativity, though a means of nominally empowering creators, will forever
be intrinsically hostile to creativity, so long as it is an incentive to
Produce.
We’ll be discussing the twofold path of monetization: one, the advertisers who are
drawn in, and two, the payout for content creation and how creation becomes…production.
Some sites have one, some sites have both— though it’s rare to see the payout without
ads, we do have one example. The focus will, at first, largely be on that latter part–
payout– demonstrated through a few models of how sites have implemented payout and the
subsequent cultural ripple.
Sites or apps changing their layout and design approach can massively impact culture and
we just kind of accept that. Think of Instagram and the change from being a place where people
once only posted wordless photos to how it’s…basically tiktok now.
Generally, apps have expanded functionality, or indeed, chased the market of other successful
apps by adding features meant to turn their platform into an alternative– again, instagram
(and youtube) trying to be tiktok. But there’s a lingering question of if people
would even *want* to use instagram or youtube to…do a tiktok, if creators weren’t directly
incentivized to create there. For a bit on how those incentives work, there’s a video
by Swell Entertainment which I’ll link below. Indeed, incentives will be a lingering theme
of this video.
Generally, the point is that things…change, and one of the biggest sources of change is,
inevitably, monetization and the culture it brings.
How about we used a made-up example to chart the general trajectory of online content spaces…
For fun, let’s just make up a site.
We’ll call it… Embler. [apologies if there’s already a cheap tech startup called this]
Embler is a picture hosting social media site. On Embler, people are able to post almost
whatever they want provided it doesn’t break laws. The site was originally intended as
a place to post stunning vistas or cottagecore home vibes (fe backgrounds). Sure, some users
would post an image of some text but it didn’t change the vibe much and was usually some
live laugh love type junk. Eventually comments were enabled and a bit
of conversation started in the comment sections, treating them like threads, sometimes irrespective
of the actual pic.
After update 1.7, called Binding internally, the site featured text posts without the image
element.
Shortly after, this became the dominant way users interacted with the platform, going
from an image posting board to sort of an… Ur-Forum, and people took to it well enough.
Eventually this change allowed for more interactivity between users and a degree of…personality
to come out from the formerly wordless space.
With that, people start amassing followers around their personalities and commentary
more than just how nice their DSLR photos looked. Sure, some people mourned the vibe
change (Camus) but generally people liked having a place to post more of themselves,
even if it is angery poetry (Camus mask). People are largely posting for the sake of
sharing their feelings or communicating with friends, but some people have started to find
reward in being recognized in an online space, and really dive into the idea of growing followerbases.
Now by this point, there have been ads on the site for a while, but it’s not intrusive.
Or, no more intrusive than on other sites.
Eventually, the site gets big and profitable enough that– to encourage growth of the
platform and “give back”-- Embler starts a program to pay their largest contributors.
The change is…subtle, at first. People just post what they always did, and indeed they
don’t meet the threshold for pay anyway. But big accounts can now make it “their
job” without having to worry about outside sponsors which were…tolerated at most by
the site administration. The fact that people *can* make it their job
becomes aspirational, even.That said, not everyone on the platform jumps at the opportunity
to earn, and the dichotomy of posters and lurkers is still there. There will always
be lurkers (lowen?). But eventually the tone of content shifts.
People are now posting things with calls to action baked in.
Advertisers have made it clear that a nebulous range of content is unwanted, even when it
doesn’t break site rules. An entire subculture once only full of aspirant
14 year olds, develops around the question of “how to get big”.
Content is made with the express purpose of pretending to hold a definitive answer, the
only true answer, to that question. In the end, creativity becomes a job option.
For some, it’s incredibly lucrative, for others, supplemental advertising is part of
their content, and for some there’s external platforms to help. These factors tether content
to routine, and so begins the phenomena of monthly content waves.
With the advent of Embler becoming a “job” comes a marked shift in quality of content,
and with a shift in quality comes a shift in expectations.
Casual amateurism becomes near derided.
Some big posters are even allowed to bend rules, so long as advertisers don’t personally
step in or, as the case often becomes, get goaded into stepping in.
It becomes clear that some people start flooding the site with content that, by just barely
skirting the line of several rules but breaking none of them, are producing cash grab content,
farming engagement, things like that. It starts to become a problem to the point of affecting
the site ecosystem. The way the site filters content starts changing
under the apparent idea of providing a better user experience, but to safeguard from bad
actors, the mechanisms of the site are kept intentionally obtuse to such a degree that
no one person, neither working on the site, working for the site, or posting on the site,
could explain how it works. This goes smoothly until eventually some users
start ironically worshiping the mechanism that filters posts. As with all ironic things
on the internet, given a digital generation, i.e. the length of one full rotation of an
American High School student body, around 4 years, the irony is lost on the new site
members, and they begin worshiping in earnest. This turns out to be the way to summon a dead
god named Gargalon or something who proceeds to vanish as suddenly as he arrived, signaling
the End of Days.
Wait what was the metaphor again?
Okay let’s go with a different approach.
I’m just gonna go through some sites I have personal experience with and less focus on
how they transformed across years, so much as how their culture is informed by the monetization.
Less before-and-after, more… case studies.
There’s this site called Medium. It’s basically youtube for sapiosexuals. It’s
like “oh I don’t watch tv I read” for the internet. Like a blog. It’s a blog.
Okay, being less facetious, it’s a platform founded by one of the co-founders of Twitter
Evan Williams–originally intended to be longer twitter. I suppose, at that time, the
name was conceived to be a declaration of post length.The design has since pivoted to
Williams’ other area of expertise, blogging.
It is now a place for blogs and air quotes “journalism” without having to make a
website or understand wordpress. It’s a hosting platform.
By the nature of how blogs have been monetized for almost their whole existence, it’s a
little hard to say whether the monetization of Medium is an innovation or tradition, really,
but there’s a bit of what I’ll call hybridization going on. The appeal, and how the site markets
itself, is as a place where one can earn from sharing their thoughts.
This is how its structured:
Medium has a whole host of categories and a tag system for designating how articles
get sorted by “genre” so far, nothing special. Now there are two types of articles:
normal and premium, with premium denoting a paywall.
If one pays for premium membership they can get past this individually selected paywall
as many times as they want. Without membership, you get to pass the wall five times a month.
Three enmeshed things make Medium interesting for our purpose: the ad-free nature, the way
people pay in, and the way people get paid.
But first things first, why does Medium exist?
The history isn’t very long and I won’t go in that deep. Essentially Williams tried
to make the first idea and it didn’t go super well, because “twitter but more words”
just means a feed of facebook rants. From there a pivot was made to article style posts,
ostensibly reinventing the blog space, and then proudly standing by that reinvention,
with an intended mission to save blogging from oncoming irrelevance. After that, monetization
for creators in the form of the paywall came up in around 2017, pivoting the content to
a sort of… each man his own New York Times op-ed writer, dogshit takes optional.
What needs to be considered is that Medium exists to pay people. Let me put it this way.
Writers existed before Medium. Youtubers didn’t exist before Youtube. Yes, people made videos
prior to youtube, but first and foremost the point of youtube originally was ease of hosting,
which led to a new type of platform. In part, Medium has that angle too: it is
a platform for articles, no need to learn how to use Wordpress or make your own website,
SPEAKING OF MAKING YOUR OWN WEBSITE, nobody sponsors me. but I bet you thought of someone,
because you’re on youtube and I said “making your own website.” Kinda scary isn’t it.
The new generation of corporate jingles being etched in your brain.
Uhh. I hope several people didn’t just click away trying to find where the ad ends, cause
there isn’t one… Medium’s main value and primary goal is
in being a place where writers can monetize their content. It is, in effect, democratizing
not access to writing, but access to deploying a paywall. That paywall is the hybrid element,
taking blogs and merging them with a tactic borrowed from traditional media outlets, themselves
archaically positioned on the modern internet.
With that in mind, let’s talk about paying in, and paying out.
Hmm. Okay well the old link to how payout works and the site premise is gone, and the
new one just says “A portion of your membership will directly support the writers and thinkers
you read the most” with no elaboration. From my memory this is how it worked…at
least at some point: For a monthly or upfront fee, users get to circumvent the paywall.
A portion of the money collected from said fee is put into a creator fund, kind of like
how shorts work on youtube, if you’re familiar. Then, the pay is portioned out each month
according to not views, not visits, but how many likes, called kudos, an article gets
*from paying members* In effect, this means the free-to-read visitors
using up one of their 5 freebies cannot contribute to payout in any manner beyond the psychological.
The way it was explained, again to my memory, was that paying members were essentially assigning
a portion of their pay-in to an article for every kudos they gave it. It must be noted
here that readers can give up to 50 kudos to a single article. There is no finite pool
of kudos to give out in a month. They’re not like casino chips with a static value.
The worth of a kudos is relative to the amount of them divvied out. This allows for some
manner of granular-satisfaction spending. In theory, if I have a membership and I give
one article a single kudo and no other articles any, that article’s writer will get my whole
prize share. If I give one article 50 and another 50, they’re both splitting it evenly.
If I give 20 articles 50 kudos, the split is, again, even.
My suspicion is that many medium subscribers are medium contributors. In one sense, this
makes perfect sense, people who are on the platform will consume on platform. It’s
a generalized hobby space in the way Youtube is, but with a narrower reach. As such, the
platform is inhabited proportionally, by a larger host of consumers who are themselves
creators.
If my suspicion is right, it would go pretty far towards explaining the nature of content
on the platform:
A culture exists on the site of writing articles– of course behind the paywall– geared solely
to be advice on how to “make it” on the platform. As we’ll see later, this is not
an uncommon dynamic. The more generalized content has its own similar vibe.
In theory, the content of the site could have taken on any shape, but instead there’s
a looming productivity cult. It may just be my experience, subscribed as
I was to the tags of “writing” and “freelancing” among the others that were “non-work interests”,
but the majority of articles put in front of me were paywalled guides to success. Going
on the site incognito, the suggestions are still productivity geared.
Here’s another question: when does one decide to put up the wall?
When people have something important to say, there’s arguments in either direction for
if they ought paywall it. Shouldn’t people earn for their time and effort? Say my story
about an important issue everyone should know about goes viral, shouldn’t I get something
for my trouble? And besides, the paywall has five free uses a month, it’s not *really*
blocking anyone from seeing my critical information…right?
There’s a lot to be said, and indeed likely a lot of ink spilled about the effects of
digital journalism colliding with a need to keep the lights on, or profit. For an example
of this, I merely cite the way some articles with information pertinent to things like
elections or the global pandemic were paywalled by big journalism sites. But is that not fair?
Was creating the article not labor? How else do we cover the cost of producing the article,
of doing the research, of hosting the information? Well, as some of you might already be aware,
that argument has some holes, biggest of which being that running a for-profit newspaper,
or even running one at-loss is not always altruistic.
Medium at certain points has paid famous people to post on their platform, behind the paywall,
another tactic that will return.
The core reason to be on Medium *is* that possible paywall, that angle of payout, and
it’s no more altruistic of Medium to “create the opportunity” than anything the Gig economy
promises.
As far as the cultural impact goes, note that there is genuine content on Medium, but there’s
also the scars of incentivizing a particular culture, of clickbait headlines, of churning
out content, of feigned empowerment. The paywall isn’t a “pay people what their worth!”
initiative, it’s an earnings scheme.
But what if there was a much worse monetization scheme for writing articles? I mean, sure
it’s a bit hard to imagine, but like… what if we combined two radically awful ideas,
like say the unusable Fandom wikis but for regular wikipedia content and cryptocurrency
Web 3.0 decentralization fantasies.
Well we don’t need to imagine, cause it was real and I was personally involved.
I simply cannot begin to tell you how excited I am to have an excuse to share this story.
Okay so back in like 2017 I was working in a bar and a coworker of mine who was a relatively
early adopter of Cryptocurrency—he’d been at it for years and, again this was 2017–
told me about this new platform that was doing a writing contest with a cash payout. Kinda.
The platform was planned to be, and explained to me as “decentralized wikipedia” which…we’ll
come back to shortly. The contest was to write the first wiki articles for the platform and
the top three articles got a prize, paid in Ethereum, a then mid-sized competitor to Bitcoin
but not as entrenched in the crypto space as it is now.
For the curious this isn’t about to become a cryptocurrency rant, though I probably do
have one in me. It is, however, important to understand the culture this site was designed
in and around. I’m not gonna go too deep into that here, and while I would suggest
Dan Olson’s Line Goes Up to get a sense of it all, the videos is hours long and you’d
forget to come back here. Also chances are you’ve already seen it.
My friend was very “in” on the idea of the platform, called Lunyr, and planned to
buy the token— which mind you is like buying stock in a company, particularly an initial
public offering– not like buying a digital currency in this case. He fully believed in
this company and their plan. I was…skeptical, but I mean, maybe there was something to it,
so I sent something in and was part of the community for a little while.
So what was the plan? Well, the short version is, as I said, a decentralized
wikipedia. But, wikipedia famously doesn’t make money unless it’s doing that fun little
guilt trip donation drive at the top. Lunyr wanted to have ads. In fact, that was a selling
point, because Lunyr itself and investors weren’t the only ones poised to make money.
They wanted to offer an aggressive meritocratic earning opportunity with their platform. Articles
would get ad revenue for clicks. And, I know I’ve implied this already, (or outright
said it) but these articles are meant to be wikipedia style articles, not recipe blogs
or news articles or whatever. But the idea is also to write an article that rakes in
views. Hmm.
So the goal becomes writing the best article, winning the marketplace of ideas, and getting
the most views. There’s a lot wrong with how this model shakes out and I’m sure some
of it feels immediately apparent. For one, topics. Writing the article on some obscure
Irish poet from the 18th century might be a non-competitive space, but it’s also not
likely to get many clicks, the incentive to write about things that aren’t already common
knowledge isn’t really there. And as for making sure articles are written well and
not just made up unsourced nonsense, well, we’ll get more into it later, but for now
just know that there were intended to be self-deputized subject experts who vetted things.
The incentive to write these things at all is dependent on pay. That’s the short version.
The monetary incentive made this immediately an untenable trainwreck.
And people… uhh Didn’t seem to get what the whole site was
even meant to be.
This really is at least half-tangential but it’s too funny to not mention.
Wiki-style articles. That’s the intent, yeah. Easy to understand, even if the “decentralized”
lingo flies over your head, even if the connection to the blockchain stuff makes no sense, the
“wikipedia” part should still click.
The submissions they got, however, and I know this from seeing what articles came up on
day one, were more like… bad Medium posts. One I saw and distinctly remember was “Why
do women date jerks?” which, after “review” was requested to be reformatted to sound more
like an academic article and renamed itself to “the jerkboy theory”...
Continuing that trend, lots of the content on the site was what you might expect from
the culture of the crypto community, even as far back as 2017. So while that one article
was basically a retooled rant about how “women only date assholes”, it was hardly alone.
There was another filled with Pick up artist dating tips. And another one I saw was about
“FEMALE SEXUAL HYPERGAMY” Almost all the articles I saw were either
slightly veiled redpill interests or literally about the crypto community itself, like articles
about Etherium or coins or whatever. This is no longer tangential, because it played
a hefty part in the site’s downfall as well. The site wanted to replace wikipedia and terrible
business model aside, it presumed it could farm out all the content generation to users,
and that somehow this would produce a rounded and totalizing pool of information.
Based on the incentives, on paper, they thought users would rush to stake writing The Winston
Churchill article, and that, presumably once the big known topics were covered, people
would go for more obscure ones, trying to claim more and more “real estate” so to
speak. My clever idea in all this was that it would
be very smart to twist articles one writes to always have an undue amount of hyperlinks
to other articles you made.
So, say you wrote the article on WW1, a HUGE topic. Not only would this be a popular search,
but it would also provide branches to *tons* of other topics. So what if you just also
happened to corner all those topics too, rushing to fill in every possible hyperlink with an
article that you made? That’s going to shape content. And moderation
was unlikely to target an article for including superfluous hyperlinks… because….
Well let’s talk about moderation.
Moderation was also expected to be farmed out. Or more accurately, it was meant to be
self-evident, done by the community, and in the community’s own interests to moderate.
Like… some kind of hyper-individuallist community effort? I dunno, in truth this whole
thing feels like a case study in how ancap communities cannot function.
In terms of moderating for quality there was only one approach and it had a simply massive
blindspot. The quality of articles would be self-correcting
because the best articles would win in the marketplace of ideas and get the clicks they
deserve.
Okay actually there’s like four blindspots there…
Let’s run through that one again. “The Quality of articles would be self correcting
because the best articles would win in the marketplace of ideas and get the clicks they
deserve.” Okay, uhh, problem one. I’m not on wikipedia
sorting articles by number of citations or how compelling the writing is, I’m there
trying to learn what the fuck this band everyone keeps mentioning is all about.
Two is that they hoped to incentivize touching up bad articles by “splitting revenue”
from an article based on edits. Now fundamental to this, on some level is the blockchain element
of it…or allegedly that was part of it. Because in theory there weren’t supposed
to be edits. Stuff was etched in stone. But in practice they actually DID do edits to
pages. I guess their idea was that users would write wholly distinct new better versions
of other articles and replace the old one… acting as market competition, but for info
on what clouds are.
But that was highly impractical, so it just opened up to editing like we saw with the
Jerkboy theory one. Sure, the old versions were somewhere on the blockchain, but that
seems to solve a non-problem. Wikipedia doesn’t have famous instances of whole articles vanishing
to censorship. Solving this non-problem just invented another one.
Open seasons was declared on articles for producing needless edits and then having to
somehow calculate shares of an article’s ownership. If I write the Winston Churchill
article and it looks like this and someone comes by and adds to it making it look like
this, do I still get a share? Keen eyed viewers might notice that I’ve literally copy pasted
wikipedia here, and no, that wasn’t just to avoid writing a whole fake winston churchill
article, it’s because this was ANOTHER LITERAL PROBLEM OF THE SITE.
Three. People were copypasting things from wikipedia. The site runners said they didn’t
like this very much, because they had to pretend to be better than wikipedia so obviously they
would curate only the most smart boy, powerful, intellectual, and thorough userbase. This
meant that, far less than the charge of plagiarism, the concern was that Lunyr’s information
ought to be different somehow. I mean, that’s in the conceit. Decentralized Wikipedia didn’t
just mean like… wiki on the blockchain. If anything, the blockchain obsession and
the practical site function were wholly divorced. It meant something to the effect of “Wikipedia
without meddling from “insert bad thing” I’d call this Wikipedia for paranoid libertarians,
but Jimmy Wales, the founder of wikipedia is already a self-professed libertarian, so
I don’t think there was some fear of his “secret totalizing control” or “political
bias” as motivation for founding Lunyr as a competitor.
Now, sidestepping the myriad of problems that presents in terms of authorial intent and
historical accuracy and biases and all that, it’s still a fundamentally absurd issue
to have. They presumed their userbase would act in good faith…which you should never
do on the internet.
They presumed that the users would prioritize the viability of the site and incredibly long
term vision, a deeply long term investment, instead of embracing the core tenant of crypto–
fast money. The site runners were so blind to this reality of their userbase that they
were genuinely *mad* that the quality of articles was as shamelessly low as it was. Eventually,
once the wikipedia copy-paste issue was “handled” by being made against the rules, people started
just doing that with articles not in English, because literally nobody on their skeleton
crew staff of 3 dudes living in LA knew another language.
All this may have you wondering, okay but what were the actual mechanisms of content
review? What does leaving it to the people/market mean?
The way things passed inspection was that someone just looked at it, verified it, and
got a cut of the future proceeds of the article for being its “quality reviewer.” Now
uhhhhhhhhhh. The level of faith in the community on display here makes the “communism only
works in an ideal world” thing right wingers say look like the utmost projection. The creators
of the site left moderation to the community, with a monetary incentive for sheer volume
of articles okayed, somehow presuming that people would take the task seriously instead
of, AT BEST clearing articles for the sake of getting in on an easy revenue stream, or
at worst and most easily manipulable– forming off-site groups that just circularly approve
each other’s stuff no matter how dogshit it is.
And so we circle back to language.
Four. Translation. Translations were supposed to also structure their payout as a pyramid
scheme. The French article on the decline of a woman’s value as she got older would
have to pay a share of its earnings back to the original English one. In turn, of course,
this led to people taking the actual articles that were up, and trying to “stake” foreign
language versions by running them through google translate.
Who cares if it’s bad? People won’t know that before they click on it, and it’s not
like entertaining content where people share it around if it’s good.
Cumulatively, we end up in a situation where there’s not really recourse to fix that
or do quality control. Say I technically wrote the first article on Alex Jones in Tagalog
by copy paste translating it. If someone goes in to fix my article, I still get a share
of whatever their work amounts to, in perpetuity. This disincentivizes people from ever improving
an article until there is literally nothing left to stake claims on. This competitive
collaboration was untenable from the start, the monetization scheme was untenable from
the start.
All that aside, the worst hole in the business model is the premise itself: Why would I go
to an incomplete website to seek my information, under the promise that this information is
“decentralized”-- somehow presuming that 1, wikipedia is centralized, which I guess
is code for secretly run by Hillary Clinton or something, and 2, that a platform with
literal monetary incentives would produce more objective high quality articles than
a volunteer system. The concept was that it was “free from censorship” but when pressed,
nobody could name an actual censorious thing about Wikipedia, and given that the articles
that came out on launch were just like… bad incel talking points, I can only imagine
what censorship meant to that community.
This whole thing was like watching someone say “Let the free market decide” without
getting that that’s just an empty platitude, as the market crowdfunds an initiative to
have Mr Market Decider himself lowered into a vat of acid.
In the end it was a terrible product with foolish goals, and a contributor-base who
cared more about monetizing an idea than seeing that idea flourish… and yet it had enough
of an earnest streak I can’t exactly call it a grift.
That said it also certainly wasn’t free of the crypto cult culture, of systematic
aggression towards anyone pointing out a flaw. A fear of fear poisoned people’s minds.
The term “Fudding” meaning fear, uncertainty, doubt, was thrown around at any instance of
a perceived critique. Naturally, this abject W for Free Speech enjoyers was not conducive
to getting problems noticed or fixed.
It’s like the toxic positivity of a video game hype train, but worse cause people think
it’s gonna make them the next American Billionaire. I think I said something in the discord one
time about how there was a bug, and got @’d by like six people over it.
By the time I had remembered the site even existed and further cashed out what I had
left of whatever paltry amount of their token I got, they had around 3000 articles up and
the vast vast majority of them suffered from these aforementioned problems. The company,
which may I remind you was literally three guys in an office, went dark in 2017-2018
though I wouldn’t say it was a rugpull. Lunyr’s failure derived from incompetence
not intent.
In the end, it’s not exactly concrete proof of where monetization leads, nor is it free
from the…cultivated culture of duplicity, haste, immediate-gratification, and outright
grifting common to Crypto land. It does, however, still provide us with an understanding of
how incentives have to meet with the userbase intent, and without sufficient control over
users in other ways, the whole thing collapses. Further, it’s a strong example of how these
platforms are reliant on incentivizing communities to exist and create for them. They needed
the contest not to drum up interest, or as a marketing ploy, but to literally get their
site populated with articles. I mean, what were all the losers gonna do? *not* post their
thing right after and try and still score some cash?
Can we learn anything from the way this site functioned? The intrinsic model of a crypto
climate warps it a fair bit to being more about early adoption and revolutionary promises.
So much is predicated on getting in at the ground floor, that the business model itself
is hardly applicable to other sites. That said, the climate of crypto is a window
into the logical endpoint of a hyper-monetized internet. Crypto itself exists with the promise
of monetizing everything. That’s why there’s projects seeking to like… turn MMO grinds
into earning potential. NFTs, by design are not only an art theft scam, but also, remarkably,
driven by the idea one can monetize *memes* something we all take as famously having no
ownership.
To return to a narrower insight: Lunyr is a case study of how their incentive structures
for generating content– or more correctly prompting user generated content, seeing as
they didn’t make anything themselves, made the collapse inevitable irrespective of the
broader crypto ecosystem.
From this, we’re set to look at incentives more narrowly and we’re going to do so on
a site that literally all of you are acquainted with.
With youtube, a journey of sorts began for me, and while I’m sure it’s got as much
passing similarity to the journey of others as it does moments of disconnect, it is my
window into another intersection of monetization and a platform, one I had far less of a view
into when I simply consumed on the platform. When I started out, it was a lonely thing.
There was nobody I could really talk to about “work” struggles. Even when I found spaces
of creators, it felt more like I was walking past communities or through their places of
congregation, on a journey alone, rather than walking with them.
I had to walk that Lonesome valley by myself.
Early on I compiled a list of videos from various creators seeking to explain the process
a bit, from Thoughtslime’s two or so tutorials on what to consider when doing youtube, to
the odd Q&As of many creators where people had asked things about The Process– and
to things less intended for the purpose of getting people into creation like Big Joel’s
video on small creators– something that gave me direction, intended or not, on where
to go next.
From there, I gravitated to these “Small Youtuber” spaces, particularly the discords.
I’m…alright at being present in online community spaces, so being in discords wasn’t
particularly strange to me. What was strange was the way it kind of reminded me of Lunyr.
Not in that it was a grift or whatever, and not that everyone there was just hoping to
make a quick buck…but they were all there to make *something*.
They wanted to Make It™
And that came with its own culture– one I wouldn’t say translates fully to Youtube
the platform, but it presents pretty plainly many concerns the platform plagues its creators
with. Brushing aside the army of 14 year old hopefuls
who join to take no critique themselves while loudly saying the system is broken because
their 2 episode minecraft letsplay has been uploaded for 19 minutes and hasn’t cleared
a million views…Most people were there to put in the work in some form.
I don’t think the space ever got competitive or included bad faith advice as some form
of sabotage, it was uplifting, but it’s uplifting in a “nobody wants to be here”
kinda way. Less Crab Bucket and more… waiting to get adopted.
If adoption required like… ample lifehacks and eye catching cool hair or something. The
metaphor is escaping me.
What I saw there was largely people trying to workshop things, figure out not just their
craft, but the algorithm. When I later “graduated” to the “Partnered Youtube” discord, it
felt like all the hustle elements of the culture were cranked up to 11. Now, there’s nothing
wrong with playing the game, so to speak. It’s impressive that people are even collaborating
and sharing how to “make it” on some level. Honestly, I kinda get why people fall for
sigma male grindset stuff. Given the way that youtubers are basically all entrepreneurs,
you’d think this stuff would be super popular here. In terms of how one “runs” a youtube,
you have to put in tons of hours before it becomes “worth your time” financially.
It’s very aspirational. But it isn’t how I hear most anyone in at
least the parts of youtube I’m on talk about their channel. It’s something more reserved
for the people who are, I imagine, yearning to be stars, thus the… yearning discords.
There’s a few reasons for why even with a *left tube* that is very concerned with
visibility and subsistence, few people fall into the grindbrain– one of which is gigantic.
Among the smaller reasons is creativity and expression. Ugh. Imagine that, creativity
is reduced to being a small impediment to hustle, rather than a counterpoint, so grand
is the large hurdle. The creativity thing is really easy to explain: People make things
cause they want to make them. That’s always going to be contrary to monetary incentive,
even when they overlap. Passion pervaded even in those youtuber spaces, even when people
were also talking about branding or falling into pits of gamification.
While I was in the Youtube Discords, I almost felt like all the advice didn’t apply to
me. At the time I debated if I was being stubborn about style, and sometimes I was, which is
why I can see growth, in retrospect, that makes me wince, that I didn’t –for example–
notice my audio was bad. But when I look back at the space I feel like it genuinely was
ill-fitting advice for the side of Youtube I wanted to end up on. Advice about how the
“first 50 videos are gonna suck” doesn’t really work for channels at my pace. Advice
about uploading every four days at the exact same time doesn’t suit longer form content.
People still had outlets for creativity, sure, but the grind took precedence. The goals were
always reaching numbers, not people.
As a brief aside: I don’t mean to sound dismissive, necessarily.
Maybe there’s some stuff in there we could all do to learn. Sometimes I worry we might
over-presume our own suppression and just stop trying to “play the game” even a
little. Sometimes I worry there are ways we are out of touch. And perhaps I should only
speak for myself here, but sometimes I worry that we value integrity more than the platform
allows and aren’t pragmatic with our concessions in order to reach goals.
But this video can’t be all worry.
Another thing those Youtuber spaces operated on, beyond grind and an…individualist community
was… some measure of mysticism. These spaces act as, whether they know it
or not, cults of appeasement And their Gospel transcends them, to the whole
of the site. The Algorithm is a capricious god to be flattered.
Guides are made, remade, rituals discussed, debates formed around the nature of the machine.
Less passion has gone into divining the cosmological significance of saints than that of the Algorithm’s
nature. The Algorithm is kept obtuse by Youtube as
a matter of practice, it is in their interest to avoid the very “gaming” most people
implicitly seek.
And in that logic, that which strives to answer the algorithm, a transformation occurs whereby
opinions and taste become “best practice” and a “language” of content creation forms
that is unintelligible to the viewers of said content. Said language is expressed in “objective
quality notes” for thumbnails. Yes, thumbnails can be bad or lack readability but there’s
nothing inherent in the human condition to the memetic prevalence of soyfacing or whatever
the hell people call the gaping mouth feigned surprise thing. Yes, arrows are something
we’re trained to look at, and then follow with our eyes, but I don’t actually know
that it makes a video twice as enticing to see them.
When Hideo Kojima “predicted memes” or whatever dorks attribute to him as “the
point” of the Gene Meme Scene and MGS2, he didn’t mean wojaks or cat pics, he meant
the way information is conveyed, the memetic conditions, stuff like the “language”
of thumbnails.
It’s a product of platform culture, regardless of it it works or is mocked…or both. Clickbait
is, allegedly discouraged by youtube’s own rules, but said rules aren't using the colloquial
definition of “kinda cringy predictable curiosity fishing” They *Want* you to do
that.
No, there’s a slight shift in how they define rulebreaking clickbait, towards being outright
deceptive, something where the content inside doesn’t match up. But how is that determined,
exactly? If Matthew Patthew doesn’t make a shocked face in his A-reel, poggin it out
big mood, is it clickbait? What about tiddy thumbnails? I don’t think there’s any
more quantitative evidence that tiddy thumbnails lead to people clicking off from a video midway
than your average thumbnail. I don’t imagine people feel betrayed that there wasn’t bouncy
bazonga content in the video titled “This GUY SOLD THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE TWICE”
Bait might just work.
But I would be skeptical of anyone who claimed to know for certain or that they could prove
it.
A lack of access to algorithmic knowledge is supplanted with what is, essentially folk
practice backed up by loose science. We don’t know the line between superstition and feature.
An example you might see on twitter is posting the link to a video in the replies, not the
original tweet, because something something links are suppressed. These folk practices
are sometimes localized to one community, and sometimes the product of… self-deputized
experts whose claim to expertise is a subscriber count.
A while ago noted Elon Musk reply guy Mr Beast gave the advice of making 100 videos before
being a success. Beyond being a comical example of falling for a survivorship bias paradigm
to ask the big youtubers how to get big when the real answer is “who knows” there’s
something very funny to how his imprecise wording led to some guy, or…probably a middle
schooler, really, in the youtube discord creating 100 videos in an attempt to follow that advice.
The Kicker here is that many of the people a step down in the “qualified to give advice”
sphere are falling for that same bias. Where Mr Beast himself is just presuming he skilled
his way to the top, the people looking to him as a case study have a different blindness.
The Beast Observers, as I’ll call them, look at large channels, huge ones, and analyze
relative success compared to eachother as though that data is unquestionably transferable.
“This thumbnail with the pog face got a million more views than this video doing uhh…ahh
the home alone face –so better keep poggin” “this title doesn’t have nouns and it
did better so we can see that nouns are out” –these methods of analysis are woefully
incurious focusing on current success patterns rather than the *rise* to that level. They
make economists look like what economists think they are.
These “analyses” from looking at huge channels to understand success presume and
ignore too much to be objective. They presume an objective path at all. First and foremost
on my list of massive blindspots is the unquestioned assumption in the analysis that from subscriber
1 to subscriber 1 million the journey has the same rules barring an exception we’ll
get to.
In presenting the “data” how they often do, there’s a presumption that Mr Beast
is earning the attention of 111 million views from scratch each time, that any and everyone
could be enticed by the ultimate juicy thumbnail. There is, at once, an urge to understand youtube
as a predictable machine, despite YouTube itself having a vested interest in that not
being the case– and an urge to pretend everyone can “make it” with the right tactics.
And while not as stark a zero sum game as Crypto, that cannot be true. Not only because
creativity and ideas will always retain a portion of value, but also because Time –even
shared across 2.1 billion people– is finite. The Attention Economy is very real.
And that’s saying nothing about taste or preference or language. It’s like pyramid
scheme exponential growth presumptions all over again. There is no way to entice the
whole of the platform. Not every single person is a potential subscriber.
Now, that’s not to disparage the actual success of these deputies. Some of their efforts
may have been naive, but their results were very real, subscriber count in at least the
tens of thousands.
But the individual practices and beliefs were not what caught my attention the most in the
end. The striking part, the thing that formed the Lonesome Valley, for me, was that these
were communities built around wanting to exit said community.
It was a space designed where everyone in it wanted to leave as soon as they could,
seeking self-reliance and independence, to have their own communities later. It’s another
“communal” space with individualist aims. Sure, people could network, but I don’t
know how much that actually happened. One channel I discovered from the starter space
is Shea’s Violin who I’m shoehorning in here with the hopes some of you will check
out her channel. Supporting others, community, is something Youtube does the least to encourage.
It’s something WE fail to encourage half the time, even though it’s important and
effective. That’s, I suspect, an implicit element of
collaboration in the space– that people collaborate in order to have an “excuse”
to share each-other. I don’t know if that marks me as paranoid, or if I’m right, but
I really do get the sense that there’s some part of it all that’s about having an excuse
to mention another creator, not as payment for the service of working together, but to
work together as a justification for citation, for name-dropping, for vouching. Building
eachother up is the main tool we have to weaken the hold the algorithm has.
In fact, there’s also a small collective trying to Kill God right now, called F the
Algorithm.
Now you may ask yourself if it’s relevant that I may have been featured on FtA as their
monthly nepotism pick once, welllll.
Really–and I do mean this–the reason I bring them up is to point at how there is
concrete organization to circumvent the algorithm through community support, rather than bow
to and be subsumed by its vagaries or sliding back down into a forced sense of individualism,
back into the Lonesome Valley.
The reason I bring up these Youtuber spaces and their counterpoint in F the algorithm,
despite not being platforms themselves, is that they demonstrate how Youtube’s monetization
culture ripples out, how it affects people even at the most entry of levels, creates
“languages” of creativity, or…moreso, production.
The creativity itself is a casualty to trying to be “picked up.” Uniformity begets best
practice, best practice begets uniformity, so unto us all. In the language of youtube
an Objectively Good thumbnail can exist. “Objectively Good Practices” exist.
Hell, while making this video I legitimately debated excising the entire Lunyr section
so I could market it as its own standalone video, one that could more easily be attached
to discussions of crypto cringe, more easily offered as some manner of companion piece
to Line Goes Up.
Alternative to making it a punchy standalone bit, I would feel disingenuous making it the
center feature of the title or thumbnail for *this* video. In turn, people won’t know
to come to this video for a juicy crypto L. I’ve had to, in that, consider the integrity
of making an exploration of monetization culture in one “succinct” video, or tearing out
a chunk to use as bait on its own. That itself is the impact of monetization culture.
In that same vein I debated the near hyperbolic positions of finding it either supremely tasteless
or entirely to my point to mention patreon in this video.
While I recognize having an algorithm and monetization culture itself are nominally
distinct and that all sites have algorithms (despite what some people think) we don’t
see the same fretting over algorithmic impact on other sites unless there’s a flare up
in consciousness about the presence of an algorithmic bias, like Facebook or Tiktok
boosting fringe ideologies. There’s a reason “Youtube and The Algorithm”
is a truly endless discussion, rivaling theology.
I’m so F*cking stressed out from running my Pet Lizard’s Instagram account, I’m
about to have A Nervous Breakdown. I told my therapist…
She said “well take a break from your pet lizard’s instagram account”
I said “I can’t! It’s my sole source of income!”
[smoking intensifies]
When I started doing youtube a year ago, I didn’t really have a sense of how to compare
my experience to others, to get my bearings on when I was doing something right or wrong,
to find feedback. I craved it, particularly, because I knew on some level platform success
was not correlated to quality. There was an algorithm in the way of meritocracy. Nevertheless,
I still held, and indeed may never relinquish, that sense of a looming… Question of Merit.
At the end of the day, I don’t know how anyone who makes content on a platform like
this could even believe in meritocracy. I’m not exactly pulling from a huge sample size,
mind you, but just from my own work since I’ve started, it’s been incredibly obvious
that Youtube has complete control over my success on the platform. You may say that’s
hyperbolic. And maybe it is, but here’s my perspective on the matter: In a space where
total appeal, that is, appeal to every single potential viewer is not my goal, all I can
do, as a creator, is try to present myself in ways that either I find appealing, or I
assume will appeal to an audience. Those aren’t entirely the same thing, and
there’s a question raised about displaying one’s own taste in personality vs appealing
to people and being a “character” but that’s a huge branching topic all its own.
Mirroring that is another branch into what living under an algorithm is even like, and
how a subculture of snake oil seminars has formed in that ecosystem, but I’ll leave
that exploration to Super Eyepatch Wolf’s video linked below. There’s little I could
add to that conversation beyond the glimpse at the creator discords I already gave.
For now I want to center on a different element, the reason for the Algorithm: Audience.
The audience we’re appealing to is and isn’t people. Of course, youtube’s algorithm,
from what we know, really only cares about marketability and watch time. It promotes
people who keep people on the platform for as long as possible, in range of their ads
for as long as possible. But there’s something of a tension there. Quality is measured by
quantity. It’s a framework of: “Let the free market of the attention economy decide”
rather than the marketplace of ideas. There’s a lot of implicit assumptions about the value
of a video in the valuing of watch time. While it would be easy, nay, expected for
me to say this is all bad, this is ultimately the quirk that has led to the relative success
of the Video Essay Genre in a world of tiks and toks. And credit where it’s due, the
reason I keep to this medium, both in terms of consumption and production are because
it is *the best* way to find and be part of thoughtful, topical, and radical conversations.
Imagine telling literally anyone in the year 2000 that there would be a video hosting site
where people make a living not just giving quirky skit-laden rants about “[popular
thing]” but in-depth analysis of global economic conditions. Imagine telling someone
that even in Early Youtube days. You’d sound more out of touch than early Lunyr adopters,
except for the whole part about being wrong.
But remember. Just as Quality is measured by Quantity here, viability is measured by
someone…or something, that doesn’t even watch the videos.
James Stephanie Sterling of The Jimquisition has– I promise I’m going somewhere with
this–, in the past, raised the point that game players are not consumers so much as
cattle when it comes to how very large publishers work their business models. The customers
are shareholders who are, in turn, catered to with large presentations not showcasing
new and exciting games, but revenue streams and monetization models. That’s why despite
being remarkably unpopular, something very few people really wanted in the games they
played, NFTs sort of manifested in a manufactured consent kind of way and were just offered
as inevitable exciting upcoming features, with the guise that players had demanded them.
It was a new revenue stream, and it indeed had been demanded by customers, but those
customers weren’t the players.
And so unto Youtube and platforms like it. Advertisers are the customers, buying ad space.
Creators aren’t creating content, as far as youtube cares, they’re creating ad space.
Content consumers, in turn, are less customers to be appealed to as they are the responsibility
of a creator to cultivate. I am but a free-range cow growing its own grass. There’s not even
an effective illusion of hierarchy here..
And, mind you, youtube doesn’t pay creators, technically.
Let’s compare this model to two typical service style jobs in the US:
A cafe job works like this: a worker puts together x drinks an hour each worth some
small cost in materials and sells them. Profit for the business comes from the difference
between the income represented by how much the drink sells for and expense in the form
of materials and labor cost. Basic stuff. A bartender is the same thing, except we have
to change the model for expense. There’s no labor cost. In a sense, because the bartender
earns from the goodwill of patrons through tips alone, as a worker, they are, from a
twisted perspective, renting the bar and its stock from the owner in order to put on a
show of work. The cost of doing their work is simply everything they made from drinks.
They may not bring their own tools. Youtube is somewhere between this. It both
seeks the charity of patrons, and gives a cut of ads. We effectively rent the platform
by paying half our earnings. In that way, pay is based on performance without pretending
to be a commission model. You’re paid what you “earn” in that you are not paid if
you earn them nothing. But at least you owe no rent for the space.
Now imagine if a bartender’s boss, instead of just scheduling for good or bad shifts,
had a lever they could pull to invite people to the bar and more or less invent a “good/busy”
night whenever. Now imagine the bartender never knows when it’s gonna happen, if ever,
and granted, no promises are made, but there’s always the idea. Instead of the normal system
of taking a slow tuesday to earn a good friday, we are constantly working Sunday, with no
idea if the crowd is coming.
And it doesn’t seem to be based on quality of work, expediency, contentedness of guests,
just quantity of drinks drunk. But there’s hints everywhere that maybe the lever gets
pulled based on what outfit the bartender wears and what drink they’ve got listed
on their sandwich board outside. More than anything, there’s a pervading
mood that the boss might hate your music taste and just hasn’t told you yet, even though
you still use the default bar playlist and radio safe edits.
That’s youtube.
To anyone who has spent more than one angry headline pondering what censorship truly is
in the corporate age, it is no surprise that the dictates of content are not the First
Amendment or “cancel culture” or anything beanie boy would decry, they’re…corporations.
I almost want to go on a whole tangent about the massive sides of the human experience
that are left out of discussion on platforms because of this angle, but I don’t want
to risk demonetizing this video that’s also already approaching an untenable length. For
just a singular example, look at what creators like Evie Lupine have to go through to talk
about their content, the hoops being jumped through, and the eternal feeling of being
“unsafe” from it all suddenly vanishing, of getting hit by the ban bat that’s so
inconsistent and malleable it might as well be a pool noodle.
Much, very much has been said on this topic before. It exemplifies the negative current,
an impact of monetization culture, just as much as bait content, just as much as memetic
language. The key takeaway from a space like YouTube is that its monetization, the way
it has the potential to be a job has shifted the incentives for making content. To Corporate
Youtube, the ideal would be that nobody even looks at or thinks about their analytics,
“just, just create some things, make stuff, fill the space,” that’s their ideal. We
shouldn’t even think of the fact the algorithm is there, just let it do its magic
Instead, they’ve created a space where entire channels find success in trying to talk people
through navigating the algorithm.
There’s a paradox to those channels too, which I only note here because I love a good
paradox. Say my channel is expressly dedicated to teaching
people about the algorithm. Subscribe for more hot tips like these! Okay, now, the audience
is only going to be youtube hopefuls. But how does one get that ball rolling? Who would
listen to some guy claiming to have Cracked the Code™ on the algorithm, who himself
only has like…300 subscribers, you know? They don’t *make* content that looks remotely
similar to what any aspirants come to them for. They aren’t like you or any of the
hopefuls. Using themselves as an example of what to do is absurd, because their audience
is remarkably desperate, by design. I don’t say this to knock them, but to simply call
attention to the way authority for these claims works.
I watched a few hours of content from these kinds of channels to shore up my thoughts
for this section and it wasn’t very worth it, at least for the sake of this video’s
content. In terms of the advice they had, I learned what I’ve always known, which
is that youtube is unsuited for “rapid pivots” as I appear to do on my channel, and that
youtube deeply prioritizes growing within niches over reaching into many niches. Which
makes sense. The reason larger channels, even in LeftTube Land can do pivots is because
with their personality in effect becoming their own niche they are, effectively, too
big to fail. By every tip and bit of advice they give,
Hbomberguy should be an abject failure channel, and yet he’s managed to “crack the code”
in an entirely different direction. It’s the kind of thing they, in salvaging authority,
would incredulously laugh off as “It shouldn’t work but it does” like a poker player who
failed to call a bluff.
Regarding the content of the gurus: The advice is usually genuine, sometimes sound,
and always more subjective than they can admit. One added feature of it all is that they often
want to play up how much youtube is “constantly evolving” so that they can remake old guides.
It’s a business.
They’re a monetized channel that makes its money in ways that I can seldom call outright
predatory, despite its intrinsically desperate audience. Some of these channels are also
the only place I’ve seen discussions of what I can only call…content creator self
care? Things like reminders of one’s own worth, that this is a job, that it’s not
a reflection of self worth, that Youtube hasn’t exactly done you any favors. It’s almost…radical
to see that in spaces so dedicated to grind.
My point is that there is a, perhaps unexpected, kindness in these guide spaces sometimes,
it’s not raw grift. But that gets washed out by where the brunt of content positions
itself.
The odd but entirely predictable prevalence of videos claiming to be a guide to the…exact
minimum requirements for monetization paints its own picture. This stuff is exclusively
a product of the monetization culture. Without the culture, yes, people would still desire
to be viewed, but I think folk practice would outstrip guides. This stuff is pure business.
It’s mysticism. It’s content that would be entirely meaningless without other youtubers
and self-imagined “soon-to-be” youtubers to consume it. It’s bait and confidence,
but that’s business.
Looking back at it all, I want to say “Oh Brave New World” to this whole monetized
platform thing, this world of creativity being a job, but the truth is… our expression
has always been for sale.
The monetization of content has always kind of been there, but in a more implicit and
insidious way. Don’t worry this isn’t about to pivot into some lecture about the
patronage of Early Modern painters or something. Also, before this point I’ve contained the
conversation to sites focused on…well, “creators” figures intended to be the key content generators.
But I want to expand our perception of what “content” is and, in turn, who does “content
generation.”
We’re sticking to the internet, and going back to 1994.
Note that there is a lot going on in this essay to come, and I won’t unpack even most
of it. I look to it here, for our purposes as a cultural artifact, one that illuminates
how innate these issues are to the internet. _______________________________________
it is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some kind of island of the blessed where
people are free to indulge and express their Individuality.
some people write about cyberspace as though it were a 60′s utopia. in reality, this
is not true. major online services, like comp-u-serv and america online, regular[ly] guide and
censor discourse. even some allegedly free-wheeling (albeit politically correct) boards like the
WELL censor discourse. the difference is only a matter of the method and degree.
i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began
to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product
which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories,
which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means
of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited.
i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned
the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer
entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived
no profit from the sale of my soul… proponents of so-called cyber-communities
rarely emphasize the economic, business-mind nature of the community: many cyber-communities
are businesses that rely upon the commodification of human interaction. they market their businesses
by appeal to hysterical identification and fetishism no more or less than the corporations
that brought us the two hundred dollar athletic shoe.
people can talk about cyberspace as a Utopian community only because it is literature, and
therefore subject to editorial revision. [Prior] events plus another where a woman’s death
was choreographed as spectacle online, made me think about what electronic community was,
and how it probably really did not exist, except like i said, as a kind of market for
the consumption of sign-value.
The full essay is linked below. It’s interesting and briefly touches many things that are…
outside the scope of our discussion. I do not intend to do a disservice to the questions
it has for diversity, feminism, greenwashing, any of that, by not including them. I recommend
it in future, and may even cite it again someday.
I won’t spiral all of this into talking about the failed liberatory promise of techno-futurism
and the internet, but I can’t help feeling like with the communal internet, we are looking
at a revolution betrayed. Perhaps that too is for another day.
From Pandora’s Vox, we see that questions of commodity, of production have been here
longer than, I would wager, half of today’s prolific internet users have even been alive.
In a sense, crypto is an attempted modern solution to this now age-old problem. It is
a solution that required the intensification of the problem in the process of solving it.
Crypto looked at how this manufacture of content for the Owners of the Internet in 1994 could
be solved by simply placing the power of monetization in the hands of creators, of manufacturers.
With that vision set, their eyes widened at the potential of making every single facet
of digital existence an earning opportunity, of effectively seeing all things as production,
without ever speaking in terms of labor. They have blurred the meaning of being “paid
for one’s time” imagining the entirety of digital existence as transactional, which
is, in some sense, like viewing every meal in one’s life by a dollar to calorie ratio.
It’s practical to a point of misery, mathematical to the point of inhumanity.
The execution of that ideal was far from successful and, in turn, more or less created monetary
schemes we’ve always had. Most of digital monetization as a practice, from 1994 to now,
has used some manner of democratization or empowerment as its rallying cry, giving YOU
the Creators a slice of the pie, finally. But from Medium’s deployable walls to crypto’s
feudal structures, to Youtube’s kingmaking ghost in the machine, we’ve gotten nowhere
fast.
Tangential to this, there’s also a means of monetizing our interaction not as a creative
energy, but as a malicious little monsters. To that, there’s a video by SK the Crusader
that goes into the Main Character phenomena, which has been with us since Humdog’s time.
Ultimately, this is not a perfect and totalizing view of the past, but it is a prescient relic.
In it, we see a disdain for imagined utopia, a critique, contempt, thus for the evangelizing
utopians… who denied the monetization was a danger. It hearkens to the cryptospace near
two decades early. But it also reminds me of someone and somewhere else.
Okay okay, no I can’t find a way to pretend Runescape is a platform, even if it does have
one hell of a shitposting community.
We’re returning to the present day with Twitter, a place I never expected would become
part of my job.
Twitter is a bit of an odd addition to this mix because it’s inherently opposed to monetization,
and not just in a “how do we even do it” kind of way like Vine was.
I… I can’t believe I’m saying this but maybe more sites need to be like twitter.
Or like it was.
I won’t go too deep into the evolving story of Twitter’s…descent, both in that it
is ongoing, and in that it’s covered ground, but here’s the shortest bit for the blissfully
logged out:
In a fundamental misunderstanding of how Verification is even given its value, Musk opted to turn
it into a mix of paid status symbol, a membership system, and a soft…inverse paywall. There
are supposed algorithmic benefits to having the verification, though nothing has materialized
as of yet. If we know anything from exploring Youtube, it’s that preferential algorithm
treatment is a dream for many. Following a slew of impersonation gags that
cost advertisers collective billions in market cap value of their stock, and delighted the
entire internet, all for $8, there are now allegedly plans to make company and government
specific verification. The whole thing has been like watching someone walk backwards
in a spiral.
Inexplicably we have ended up with Musk being a hands-on moderator like this is some dingy
DnD forum in 1994, or a contemporary crypto scam.
There has, for weeks now, been talk about abandoning the platform. But there’s an
important part of that which hasn’t exactly been hashed out.
The reason “where do we go now” is an unanswerable question is because all the options,
frankly, suck. Those of us on twitter know we are on an imperfect platform. And all the
other ones are no better. People talking about Hive bring up that it’s “owned by an ableist
and a trump supporter” as though that isn’t the case with 4/5ths of the venture capital
funded tech landscape. Like seriously, good luck finding a site that
isn’t owned by an ethically compromised billionaire.
My personal solution is that we all just colonize academia.edu and set up accounts, shitposting
in faux-essay, or critical response format.
“Sir, I have reviewed your recent post with regards
to the claim that Stalin “would have been an e-boy” with intense frustration. It is
clear to me you lack either the seriousness or the vigor to make it in this discipline.
Clearly, Bukharin was the one with e-boy energy.”
Now, realistically twitter is no stranger to jokes and hyperbole about leaving the “hellsite”
forever, but I want to, for a moment, take quick stock of what stands to be lost with
Twitter, because I think it’s dawning on people that this sucks for a reason.
Twitter is very helpful and effective for activists and outreach programs.
Much has been said about the efficacy of organization and dissemination of information during the
Floyd protests.
For an even older example, think of the role social media took in the Arab Spring, you
may likely know more about the presence Twitter had in that historical moment than the current
state of a single country for whom it was historical.
But those things are practical. They’re important, but not the focus of this discussion.
I won’t go into every detail of twitter’s culture, as shitpositng is more universal
than the site, but I will explain what features I think make it both a useful tool, a place
of communities, and in some ways, resistant to advertisers and…until now, cataclysmic
levels of monetization.
Twitter’s features allow for relatively easy circulation of content, but also curation
of one’s own feed. Where places like Tiktok just blast you with the next thing in a row
and it can be like Russian Roulette for transphobia, twitter is more about following people than
implicit ideas. There is an algorithm, to be sure, but ad-spaces are noted when they’re
present, and other than the occasional slot dedicated to outright promotion or “based
on your likes” content, most of the momentum behind discovery is social networking.
Corporations know this, which is why there’s the existence of Brand Twitter, and brands
trying to go viral.
Likes and retweets come from individuals, and while you can’t exactly predict the
extent of what a mutual might like, which could mean getting smacked in the face with
er*tic zootopia art, for the most part it’s a curated experience.
The other end of this curation is that muting and blocking accounts is easy and effective.
You can block advertisers, no questions asked. It’s so mundane a significant feature I’m
going to repeat it for emphasis: you can block advertisers.
That may sound like it would cost twitter a lot of potential clients, but think of it
as the obverse of self selection. Advertisers want their product shown to people who *are*
interested, and if people who expressly *aren’t* block them, that’s not a “wasted” impression.
Some people like to brag about how deranged their ads get because of their expert curation.
Ads themselves are not rampant, which makes me wonder if Musk’s claim that Twitter Blue
will give you half the ads is either true and meaningless, or they’re going to also
crank the ad dial. …if there’s anyone left who wants to advertise.
Either way, it is very funny to see a paid premium service that doesn’t even offer
an ad-free experience. And again, we had the means to block ads we didn’t like, which
could be…cathartic.
Ads aren’t the nuisance of twitter, bots are. But bots are blocked just as easily and
only really swarm to viral posts or ones that mention keywords. I took a video of finding
an ad, blocking it, and then scrolling until I found another one and gave up after 2.5
minutes because I was tired of speed scrolling. Note this isn’t emptier than pre-Musk. The
only difference is that half the ads now are some Saudi image laundering program.
Interesting to note here is that Musk’s paid verification system conflicts directly
with this “block whoever” system. With this system of “negative curation” the
incentive to actually be boosted isn’t all that strong when you anticipate selective
blocks. Verified status won’t evade blocking. And in turn, as intimated when I said this
became a new badge of shame to wear, people have already figured out that best practice
will be to auto-block anyone that has paid verification, at once getting rid of the clowns
willing to shell out and nullifying the signal boost they paid for.
This, all together, is the impact of monetization, even in the negative, in resistance. Twitter
is resistant to monetization because it gives the users some tools of curation.
And even without those tools, Twitter doesn’t have the same capacity towards monetization
as something like Youtube. Musk, bizarrely, said in one tweet that he planned to turn
twitter into a youtube competitor, saying it would be partly financed by the verified.
This would ostensibly adopt a somehow worse form of what Medium does with its content
with a vastly more significant data footprint. He wanted to offer room for posting 40 minute
videos at 1080p. That could be anywhere from 300 mb to 3 gigs an upload. On top of that,
Twitter does not have what I would call a navigable system. Tweets are meant to be flung
into the aether and then forgotten about, not something as laboriously crafted and “shelf
stable” as a youtube video.
Let’s step aside for a second.
A few months ago Patreon lost a LOT of money and had to fire a LOT of people over a failed
attempt to break into tiktok. What Patreon did was throw a lot money at a few big tiktokers
and *some* money towards mid sized ones, in an effort to promote patreon, to get the tikotkers
to try it out and tell everyone to pay them. This misstep was colossal.
For reasons other than this, I was already convinced that Patreon didn’t understand
its own platform. But illustrative for our purpose is how they failed to understand Tiktok.
They assumed that creation was the same on there as it would be on youtube, that fandoms,
followings, support, was the same. They mistakenly assumed that just because a tiktokker had
1 million subs and millions of views, it would be the same as hooking youtube audiences.
They failed to consider the relative value people put into short form video content consumed
in a slurry. Supporting creators from places like Youtube off-platform leads to the creation
of things meant to endure– works.Tangible things. Not necessarily to be viewed as funded
projects, but at least as something with presence. There are people who make longer form content
than shorts for whom patreon would also be a bad fit, on youtube no less. They also tried
to get Mr Beast to join patreon which is an even worse idea and I cannot afford to tangent
into that. The point is that they saw that some youtubers
use patreon and without thinking through the specific details of who, why, and how, they
tried to slap that idea onto another video platform.
Similarly, Musk failed to consider just how many people would be willing to pay for twitter.
Sycophants came out of the woodwork to be like “it’s just $8” usually ending it
with the new calling card of the least funny people on earth, the tilted cry laugh emoji.
All that to say that Twitter is not in the hands of someone who understands twitter.
Musk is redesigning the app around his own experience with having an abnormally high
bot following and presuming that’s a shared experience for all users, he’s presuming
his experience as the world’s richest man is normal. He’s listening to a cadre of
dorks and somehow creating a publicly observable echo chamber. Twitter is, ostensibly, in the
hands of those assuring the emperor his clothes look lovely.
This leads us to the situation we were always in, Twitter, our space, is out of our hands.
I have likely done an imperfect job distinguishing creativity and production.
To that end, I will restate and emphasize.
Creation is jeopardized when it becomes production on the behalf of an entity like these platforms.
However, on these platforms we cannot avoid our creations becoming productions, even when we are, ourselves, unrewarded.
Digital spaces are not a commons, not freely owned by us all, though we are what comprises
them. Without people, there is no platform. That leads to a separate and, perhaps more
subliminal theme:
The way that these sites rely on users as content creators.
Simply that. In part, though not formally a response to
Line Goes Up, it did inspire this work, in a perhaps unexpected way. The obvious route
would be that I had the Lunyr story, but really it wasn’t the “I too know about crypto
nonsense” as much as it was that it forced me to remember those spaces, their culture,
and in doing so, I reconciled the uncomfortable overlap with my youtube experience, with discussions
of individualist communities, aspiration, “making it.” I remembered that while crypto
is a creatively bankrupt space, conversations in Small Youtube were nearly as stark. What
Lunyr did in having it’s only remotely academic articles end up being about crypto projects
feels like what Medium is doing with its articles on being good at Medium, what part of youtube
does with its gurus.
There’s value to understanding how cultures shift with monetization, and how incentives
are formed, and how those incentives shape what gets produced, but the biggest unifier
here is that we don’t congregate on these sites because they, the site, provide us with
content, we congregate to witness and experience other people. Despite these dual revelations,
that of the filters and walls monetization creates and of platform versus people, we
are not granted some easy actionable control. We are, thus, bound on both ends, unable to
control our own output, even as nominally free agents, and unable to reorganize.
Efforts such as F the Algorithm, as I mentioned, attempt to change this. Supporting others
attempts to change this. But working within these systems, there will always be that specter
of monetization, wielding the algorithm like a scythe.
This is not my moment to call for revolution so that I may make art freely without having
to earn my keep, no, even now in the throes of some form of passion, I have the clarity
to see that as hyperbolic. It is more a reminder that we are creating communities in spaces
we cannot own, cannot control, cannot take ownership of. What does the Twitter Purchase
prove if not that? There is no Promised Land we might flee to next.
To end this on a note about the Digital Commons would appear to get away from my point, but
in truth these things are interlinked. As I said, as Humdog expressed for us, these
problems have been with us far longer than even the titans of the modern internet in
Google and Facebook. We saw the flood wash over the dreams of the
early tech utopians, and we could not build upon that land, for laying foundation deep
into mud, jagged with rubble, required power we could not have, could not organize. It
is not the fault or failing of anyone on the internet today that it is how it is. Companies
laid new foundations, and we moved onto the land they owned. The Commons was never an
option, the root issue, bigger than the whole of the internet.
Originally I intended to just cut this video off. Full stop. I wanted to end on a note
of dramatic impact but I don’t think it matters that much. People click off when they
do and being overly wrought in drama in the last ten seconds isn’t what makes a video
“do well” I’m very very brainpoisoned right now about
algorithms and success and caught in that mixed web of like, wanting things to do well,
naturally, and worrying I’m losing sight of the distinction between reaching people
and reaching numbers. As I said at the start, this video has (or
will have, depending on schedule) a companion video that’s fully anecdotal and just exploring
the last year. It’ll probably also be melodramatic or sappy.
Speaking of sappy. Thanks, like, real, sincere thanks to everyone
who contributes to the production of these things, be it voice talent, with Little Hoot
and Armchair Egyptology, script reads,..letting me use the lizard breakdown, or patrons.
..That’s not to say or imply prior thanks were insincere, but I guess making this has
made me hyper-aware of support. Voiced Credits thanks this time go to:
Chandler Mason* Étienne Garant*
Freddy* Hausum*
Nic* Nitesurgeon*
There’s a few new names here, and sorry if you came for map game and got smacked with
this. There will be map game again soon, after the video in early January where I’m remaking
my first one. That one doesn’t really have a negotiable schedule spot if it’s an anniversary.
But there I go, breaking my rule on promising things.
Uhh, bye.