people who work for companies like Buzzfeed and other 
    agencies, creating extremely successful web content for
    them, having to work shifts at night on top of their 
    media jobs.

In my opinion part of the problem is that these kind of jobs are too much glamourized[1].

If a job doesn't pay enough (according to any metric) move on to a better paying job. If an industry or a field doesn't pay enough, move on to another field/industry.

At one point one must be honest enough to admit "this isn't working" or "this barely works, It's not wise to live like this".

[1] a similar scenario: van life. there was a fad where a lot of people were trying to get a lifestyle income by living in a van and blogging about that (instagram, youtube, twitter and stuff like that). needless to say, after a while a wave of videos about "the truth of vanlife" has come up. Once again, people don't realize that for one person managing to achieve a huge success, another thousand (or more) will fail, possibly with consequences.

This has also always been commonplace in the media industry for creatives. Simply put, the supply of labor far far FAR outstrips the demand. It's a highly risky career path, but many take the chance because they want to. No amount of complaining or legislation will ever "fix" it.

Also known as “compensating differential”. People _want_ to be a musician or content creator so they are willing to do the job even without being paid much. Which pushes the value down for the job.

If you paid people YouTube rates to maintain php garbage they would just say no which keeps the prices up at a decent level.

> People _want_ to be a musician or content creator so they are willing to do the job even without being paid much. Which pushes the value down for the job.

Well, no, I don't think so, because this isn't like the market for maintaining PHP garbage. :) Creative work -- at least in this context -- isn't fungible. One low-rent PHP contractor is probably interchangeable with another one, but Patreon creators are not: if you're giving Bob $5 a month, it's because you specifically like Bob's stuff. What a Patreon creator with 50 patrons makes has no material effect on what a Patreon creator with 50,000 patrons makes.

This is why capitalism is successful. You need an honest feedback mechanism from labor. If a centralized government assigned people jobs of maintaining a shitty php monolith at a standard wage those people would effectively produce nothing, because it is a shitty job and those people would not enjoy it or work hard because it is unfair that other people get better jobs. The unintended consequence is income inequality but that inequality is the only way to get someone to be a garbage man instead of a youtube commentator or beer reviewer.

It’s unacceptable that people building their own channel/brand/art have to work nights while doing a day job?

This is normal. Life doesn’t owe you success. You have the suffer and work hard if you want more than a day job. Or move to somewhere with low rents and eat rice and beans for a few months, that also works.

Success isn’t guaranteed and certainly society doesn’t owe you it.

I think this is a fair criticism of Buzzfeed, after all, they have an employee/employer relationship with said creators; this is not true of independent creators.

If they're not getting paid enough they should stop doing it. If enough of them stop doing it, then the rest will start to get paid more.

It's the exact same argument I keep making about tipping - if only everyone everywhere stopped tipping overnight, this stupid system would disappear. Underpaid waiters and drivers would find other jobs because suddenly without tips they wouldn't be able to support themselves.

I am also surprised that no one has seen the wisdom of my words yet :P

These are collective action problems [1]. Many of the biggest problems facing humanity are collective action problems. We’d have done a far better job fighting COVID, for example, if we could get every person in the world on the same page. Likewise for climate change.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

The situation you advocate for is common practice in many countries.

I'm likely missing nuances, but to me it seems that the key culprit is minimum wage laws in many US states having an exception for restaurant personnel. If a minimum wage was unconditional and high enough to live from, you wouldn't need tips to survive.

The US has a big cultural expectation of tipping, so even though the entire west coast, NYC, Chicago, and Washington DC have gotten rid of lower tipped minimum wages and effectively increased wages for waitstaff, almost all people still tip in all of those places. Even more, over the years, the standard tip amount has moved from 10% to 15% to now what seems like wide support for 20%. Not to mention that large portions of the population now tip for non waited transactions too.

It gets even crazier when you go out with people and they look at you like you’re cheap for calculating tip on pre tax amounts. There’s a lot of pride in the US for tipping, as if it’s a status symbol.

Nothing stopping you to not tipping. You don't need to wait for everyone to stop tipping for you to not tip right now.

In general I agree with your statement. But the grim reality is that good jobs are hard to get. It’s not always possible to find better opportunity. And you may not have the resources necessary to find something better (e.g. I can’t afford to go in a better job opportunity‘a interview, because I can’t get time off my current job, and I need this job to survive.

About 10 years ago I was living in San Francisco on less than $25k/year. Half my money went to rent, the other half went to food and the occasional movie. I couldn’t cook much, as I didn’t have a kitchen. I was able to increase my income because I’m educated, know some of the right things, and I got lucky as hell. But I was surrounded by people living on less who were flat out stuck. They all asked me why I was living there, and the answer was because I had started a business while homeless and got lucky enough that it was taking off. But I was super lucky to have that opportunity at all.

This is such a bizarre take. You're living in San Francisco, one of the most prestigious cities in the world, and yet you're describing your situation as if you're living in Sangvor, Tajikistan.

No one in San Francisco is stuck. [1] By skipping a few of those movie tickets and buying months in advance you could get a plane ticket out of there. In plenty of places in the US there isn't even an airport, not to mention outside the US.

> I couldn’t cook much, as I didn’t have a kitchen.

You don't need a kitchen. You can just have an electric stove in your bedroom. [2]

You're right in saying that you were super lucky. Lucky to live in San Francisco.

--

[1] Except for the mentally ill and people with other similarly valid severe disabilities.

[2] https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/07/19/us/0722-hkecon-pr...

You're right of course, most can leave. But in leaving you are leaving perhaps your best market (depends on what you do, but as an example, let's say you DJ). And also, by extension, you're sort of suggesting everyone making less than 6 figures leave.

I'm putting words in your mouth, I know, and I apologize. But it's the gentrification I am bringing up.

So many construction workers that repair roofs, install drywall, etc. in Silicon Valley live several hours away in Los Banos and have that crazy commute to get to where they can find employment.

Crazy world we live in.

The housing policy of San Francisco definitely makes lives more difficult than it has to be.

My point is more so around realizing the wealth of opportunity. Yes not every DJ will make it in San Francisco, but as you allude to, in most places in the world zero DJs will make it.

I don't claim that life can't be challenging in/around San Francisco. I'm claiming that it's less challenging than in almost anywhere else in the world.

Agree.

And do where? The money I knew how to earn was in San Francisco. I didn't know how to earn a living in a much cheaper spot. Everything I knew was there. If I scraped together enough money for a plane ticket, what would I do when I got there?

There are free government and non-profit social counseling services where people help you figure out what job you can do. There's also reddit and your friends/family for easier non-professional advice.

However, I think it's completely fine that you stayed in SF and made progress there.

As for your claim that you could earn some money in SF and not elsewhere - that's the core of my argument. My point being that San Francisco has more opportunity than pretty much anywhere else in the world. That you specifically could make money in SF, but not elsewhere.

No doubt that earning much less than plenty of other SF residents can have an emotional impact and make it look like your life isn't going so great. It's just that when you look at the US as a whole, or the world as a whole - then SF starts looking like a fountain of opportunity.

sure, but these are not jobs, they are things anyone can do, and might get paid for. If they got rid of the payments all together, people would still do it for free.

So volunteer work.

Basically, kind of like commenting on HN or answering questions on stack overflow

The implication of that is that Big Tech has been selling snake-oil, and the idealism attached to the Internet was misplaced.

Have they? I haven’t seen a single promotion on YouTube telling me I could make a living being a content creator.

I think people hype them selves up about it when they see the top 0.5% on YouTube and think they can be the same. Nowhere have I seen YouTube lie or mislead about this.

The problem is there are simply too many content creators. We don’t need “generic lets play guy 373628”. There is more than enough content pumping in to the system right now.

I mean, fine, YouTube doesn't get out with a bullhorn and yell "Make a Living with Videos!", but their incentives make it seem like a path to stardom.

"Too many content creators" isn't a problem. "Too much bad content" is.

> Too much bad content" is.

Is it? How else do you grow "good content", short of curating it (with all of the topdown biases and blind spots that that approach implies?)

On top of that, who decided what "good content" is? I occasionally get recommendations from Weird YouTube, and sometimes they're absolutely delightful. This sounds a lot like "nobody needs more than three broadcast channels"

The solution to "too much bad content" is to ensure that the producers of that content get so little reward that they decide to stop making that content - which is what's happening here.

Which incentives are you referring to here? As far as I can tell, all of the small Youtube creators are there because they enthusiastically want to make videos; I've never seen anyone say they wanted to do something else but Youtube tricked them into thinking they could get rich and famous.

Youtube IS a path to stardom, and a much easier one than anything preceding it, however people chasing stardom rarely care about money until they grow up and realize they don't know how to do anything else. It's not like the term starving artist is new.

But this is not "youtube and patreon", but "employer buzzfeed does not pay their employees enough".

That sounds like a criticism of Buzzfeed. Why should YouTube and Patreon step in and subsidize those salaries? Why not that the employer (Buzzfeed in your example) pay a living wage?

... didn't buzzfeed have to lay off a bunch of staff because they're losing money?

that's a different problem vs creators not getting much monetization and payment.

businesses that employ people for low wages should, in theory, be out competed by businesses that would be willing to pay a little bit more to get the talent.

So either the business model _requires_ the low wages for it to work, or the workers are not shopping around for a better workplace (or is sacrificing their wages in the hopes of moving up, or some such passion-related reason like game developers).

> or the workers are not shopping around for a better workplace

Perhaps they are not shopping around because of monopolistic/anti competitive actions from google search causing competing video services to be unviable.

I believe there is an ongoing legal case around this.

Edit: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/google...

It is kind of funny getting the amp link in this discussion...

This doesn't make any sense. The discussion is the pay that buzzfeed pays their content creators. If the market for platforms was wide open, that wouldn't change much about this situation, since there would still be an oversupply of content creators that want a salary (as opposed to creators willing to personally take on the investment and risk, which is what the article but not the thread is abjout).

On the other hand, people who work entry-level jobs also work multiple job sometimes

Sounds like they need a union