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Re:Why I Work on Ads by nonameiguess on Thursday May 06, 2021 @08:30PM (#27070547)
No, they don't. Creative jobs have always been boom or bust, following a power law where ten people earn a living directly off of it and everyone else waits tables by day and hopes to someday catch a break. That was fine for centuries. The world didn't collapse prior to the invention of widescale cross-site tracking of user behavior to create intelligent targeted ads, and I'm not sure it was worse for "content creators," either. Maybe they're just being old and grumpy, but the actual most talented people in creative industries seem to yearn for yesteryear when they were allowed to actually be creative and all the major publishers and studios weren't in an unwinnable death race to the bottom with Netflix and Amazon seemingly generating true crime docs and superhero stories by algorithm.

As for quality, it's all opinion, I guess, but the only form that seems to have gotten better recently is prestige television, but even there I'd say it so far peaked around 2010. Film and pop music peaked in the 60s and 70s. Instrumental music, literature, and painting peaked centuries ago. Artists have created perfectly good art for as long as humans have existed without the need to track their consumers private behavior to develop targeted ad profiles.

Re:Why I Work on Ads by chillacy on Thursday May 06, 2021 @10:23PM (#27071265)
> Creative jobs have always been boom or bust ...

> That was fine for centuries...

I always assumed that this was an artifact of recording technology: if you can record a movie or music, then you can have a handful of actors and musicians service the entire world, but without that each city needs its local musicians and theater troupes. If that's correct then we've been in this state for maybe 1 century.

For writers though it's been centuries, since writing enabled distribution of content in many places.