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.