Some extension of the Patreon model onto decentralised social media could work. I pay a few bucks a month to the creators of webcomics and other content that I enjoy, just because it's the right thing to do, and I dunno, it makes me feel more connected to these people that I've never met but who bring me some joy?

The amount of people like you is nowhere near enough to develop and maintain a robust economy.

I disagree. YouTube is absolutely filled to the brim with Patreon supported content. Even large channels need significant alternative income streams like merch to exist in the way they do, and they're still profitable. A sliver of the viewership cares enough to pay, but when you reach hundreds of thousands of people, you don't need all of them to pay for you to be profitable.

We used to have a "pay for what you consume" economy and I don't see why that suddenly can't exist anymore.

> YouTube is absolutely filled to the brim with Patreon supported content.

Tell me how many of these content creators are exclusively supported by Patreon.

Also, ask any of these content creators (that supposedly are able to be sustained by Patreon) if they would be willing to move away from YouTube and into another platform like Peertube.

None of them will. Some of them won't mind creating the Peertube channel and distributing their content as well, but no one will leave YouTube, because they all know that YouTube is still the platform that enables all the economy to exist.

I'm not saying this because I don't like the Patreon model. Quite the opposite. [0]. But it's hard to argue with numbers, and the numbers are just not in favor of this idea that a whole industry can be supported by a minority of enthusiasts.

[0] : https://blog.communick.com/communick-collective-a-zero-commi...

Regarding your first question, it’s a bit of a trick question because no one is purposefully demonetizing their videos even though the ad revenue is relatively low, but Adrian Black from Adrian’s Digital Basement came to mind as someone that is supported almost exclusively by Patreon. He never does sponsors on his channel, only makes money from Patreon and a bit from ad revenue from YouTube, and specifically thanks to his Patreon income was able to quit his tech job and go full time in YouTube.

LGR is another one that comes to mind that I think barely ever does sponsors and makes most of his income from Patreon. I’m sure there are many others as well.

Can we get them out of YouTube and onto their own PeerTube server?

Not a rhetorical question. If there is anyone that is not dependent of YouTube's revenue and already amassed enough supporters, is there anything holding them to Google?

I feel like the main thing would be discoverability. If they’re not showing up in people’s recommended they’ll have significantly lower viewership which could ultimately affect their Patreon income over time.

They’re both techie enough to set one up, so I feel like the best approach if they were interested would be to set it up as a mirror and see how it goes with traffic. That way they’re at least not beholden 100% to YouTube for their livelihood.

Another thing that just came to mind, how is discoverability of PeerTube in search results compared to YouTube? I wouldn’t be surprised if Google promotes YouTube links over PeerTube in search results which could also have a big impact.

> I feel like the main thing would be discoverability.

"Hey everyone, big update! I'm leaving YouTube and moving my channel to PeerTube. You can follow me at @myusername@myserver. My last video on this channel will be a quick tutorial showing how PeerTube works and why it's better than YouTube. See you there soon!"

> If they’re not showing up in people’s recommended they’ll have significantly lower viewership which could ultimately affect their Patreon income over time.

Why? If they already have a substantial amount of patrons, surely they are not worried about pleasing the algorithm. They can live off solely off their fans who support them directly. Right? Right??

> I feel like the best approach if they were interested would be to set it up as a mirror and see how it goes with traffic.

Ahem, which part of "Some of them won't mind creating the Peertube channel and distributing their content as well, but no one will leave YouTube, because they all know that YouTube is still the platform that enables all the economy to exist." did you miss in my original comment?

Sorry about the caustic response. I'm just tired of wishful thinking passing for grounded reasoning. When/if you find me one creator brave enough to put moral principles over their own livelihood by leaving YouTube, then I'll accept that Patreon alone is a viable alternative. Until then, it's just signaling and posturing.

Without knowing what percentage of revenue is from Youtube and what percentage is from Patreon, this isn't really important. You can get 10% of income from Patreon and still be considered "Patreon supported."

> We used to have a "pay for what you consume" economy and I don't see why that suddenly can't exist anymore.

Piracy and entitlement.

So what? Not every product needs to be at the 100m user scale to be a success.

The nice thing about this era for a creator is that having 10,000 dedicated fans is enough.

Dedicated fans will happily monetize on you. 100,000 low engagement fans won't make nearly as much.

> Not every product needs to be at the 100m user scale to be a success.

But the absolute overwhelming majority of content creators are putting all the work with the hopes of achieving that scale of success.

> The nice thing about this era for a creator is that having 10,000 dedicated fans is enough.

For one creator, yes. For a whole economy that can bring billions of dollars per year, you will need to have a much larger consumer base, and you'll need to have a substantial part of them willing to support a lot more than a handful of creators.

Tiktok paid peanuts but had a large enough audience to get lots of attention. The money on Tiktok comes from brands being marketed (often via product placement), not necessarily from Tiktok itself. Tiktok does pay people, but not nearly as much as you'd think with how many influences are out there.

I don't think the existing product placement industry will suffer on alternatives, but Tiktok has what its competition lacks: an excellent algorithm, not bogged down by any ethics, optimised for pulling in as many people as possible. Filtering out ugly or disabled people and algorithmically censoring speech all across the spectrum would never pass on any open system, but it has worked wonders on Tiktok.

That's why I don't think open source alternatives will ever be popular, even if they find themselves backed by investors and paying out creators: they're still too ethical to be profitable.

Maybe professional content creators don't need to exist at all. I look at people like PewDiePie and MrBeast and I wonder if society really needs anything that makes those men possible.

You are looking at the extreme end of the bell curve and think they represent the totality of the group.

For every Mr. Beast, there are tens of thousands of other people with 10k-1M subscribers who produce valuable content which would never exist if it were not for the already existing audience.

I chose those names because they are a pure distillation of "everything that is wrong..." But it's pretty easy to find lots of issues that wouldn't exist if "digital media content creator" wasn't a job that kids today are aspiring to.

Look at video thumbnails and "YouTube face". Look at how many videos are feature-film length ordeals: there is no way everyone is actively watching all that content; they're all putting it in their TVs in the background. Look at how every video on YouTube is at least 10 minutes long: that happens because it means the video will get a second ad spot. If it comes down to making a 9.5 minute video it a 10.1 minute one, well, nobody is going to pass up stretching an extra 36 seconds out of the B-roll.

If you're an advertiser, it's gotta be driving you mad. All this micro-optimizing for length to get ad spots has to be really destroying their click through rates. Which is fine with me, actually, cry me big crocodile years. But it's probably also why they've spent so much effort on in-video sponsorships. Now that really pisses me off, because I'm paying YouTube for an ad-free experience and yet YouTube turns a blind eye to its content creators circumventing my preference.

But all of this would go away if YouTube didn't pay content creators. "Why shouldn't people get paid for their work?" They should. But posting to YouTube shouldn't be someone's job. Because the remuneration system is perverse.

> But posting to YouTube shouldn't be someone's job.

Why not? Should they instead be kissing someone else's ass to get an unpaid internship at some lawyer firm? Aiming to get a stable job at one of the Big 4 accounting firms? Helping big fat cats get even fatter by working on VC? Toiling at some farm? Taking care of our kids at salaries that barely affords them to live close to where they teach?

No one is being forced to do YouTube videos, and if that's what they are preferring to do, maybe it is better than the alternatives?

> Why not?

I said why not. Because the remuneration system is perverse.

The vast majority of people on YouTube are not going to make any money for what they post. I don't just mean "pocket change they wouldn't have had otherwise". I mean literally 0 dollars versus YouTube easily taking in millions over the long tail.

As an example, I'm one of these such creators. I have a few videos that have been up for a long time and in that time have gathered low 100k+ views.

If those views had all occurred in one month, YouTube would pay me somewhere around $2000. But because this happened over 10 years, YouTube has always said, "eh, you know what, it's not enough to bother."

I'm sorry, but in any other case, if someone wasn't paying me $200 a year that they owed me, I'd be pissed. But I digress, that's not the issue, and that's not why I post videos to YouTube.

The issue is that this is the case for the majority of content creators on YouTube. YouTube makes a massive amount of money by exploiting people's content that they will never pay 1 red cent for. For a lot of those people, they continue on because of a misguided dream that they might one day get to be they anointed few who gets to have their "fair" share of their content.

Through the revenue sharing model, YouTube has created a perverse incentive structure that pushes content creators to do things in ways they wouldn't otherwise have done, on a promise that is likely never to occur. YouTube creator shouldn't be a job not because I think YouTube creators should find "something better to do", but because YouTube is a shit company that shouldn't be allowed to operate the way they do.

Sorry, you previous post started complaining with "digital media content creator" in general, then you moved on to complain about YouTube.

If your problem is with the implementation from one company and not the whole idea, fine. But this is not an issue with the "revenue share" model.

Also:

> For a lot of those people, they continue on because of a misguided dream that they might one day get to be they anointed few who gets to have their "fair" share of their content.

It's not different from basketball/baseball/football players that spend all their young years working for free and expecting to become pro. Or musicians who get into pay-to-play circuits in the hopes of ever becoming the next star, or fashion models who endure all the crazy routine of a talent agency based on the dream of being as rich as Gisele Büdchen, and even to the batches of YC founders that are given 500k and are told "no, no, this money is not for you. This money is for you to try to make a billion dollar business. Your first priority is to make me even richer, not your well-being."

Yes, it is no different, and it's a problem. Football players and noodles are especially good examples. These are people who literally destroy their bodies on a promise that is oversold. So maybe the entire system should be done away with. If we can't have professional sports players and professional models and YouTube content creators without exploitation, then maybe we shouldn't have them at all. I dodn't see it as much different from not legalizing hard drugs like heroin. If the drug is too addictive to allow for responsible use, then we shouldn't have it at all.

If you follow some of the creators that got big in YouTube and are also now big in Tik Tok, you'll see that it's actually worse in Tik Tok. Unlike YouTube that distributed a percentage of revenue, Tik Tok has a flat "creators' fund" that gets doled out proportionally. So where a boy account on YouTube draws more revenue to YouTube, that makes the pie bigger, so pre-existing accounts aren't losing out just because someone else is doing better (e.g. they serve different demos). On Tik Tok, each account is not just in competition for existing eyeballs, they're in competition with all other accounts regardless of overlap of audience.

As much criticism as they get, they are at least less opaque than the big corporate media guys who are making movies, TV, and news.

I think this is a large part of the problem with YouTube and the like. People seem to act like, because this isn't traditional media, then the creators must be more like us than them. Maybe that was true at the dawn of YouTube 15 - 20 years ago. But it's definitely not true now. The way these content creators work is a huge apparatus of media production indistinguishable from any other production studio in traditional media. Indeed, maybe if them even aspire to get into traditional media. Well, until they find out the raw deal the distribution companies want to give them, that is.

Leaving Tiktok and YouTube aside, viewing posters on Twitter as "content creators" would be dangerous. We don't want to judge tweets by the metric of whether they are the most engaging

Posters on X are "content creators" and get paid based on impressions.

Twitter never paid top tweeters. The X attempt at payouts seems to be yet another component of making the platform worse. Mind you, Vine collapsed over a dispute with its creators.

People happily post on Bluesky or HN for free. I think paid content is a different genre, and we need to figure out how to get people to pay for it other than advertising.

> People happily post on Bluesky or HN for free. I think paid content is a different genre, and we need to figure out how to get people to pay for it other than advertising.

I think this is so important and something that gets missed a lot, especially any place that is even tangentially related to "entrepreneurship" like HN. "Why wouldn't you try to monetize every single aspect of your life?"

I do wood working as a hobby. People keep asking me if I have plans to sell my stuff, then they look at me weird when I say no. Some of them even look like they've been personally insulted, which is weird considering I'm the one being pressed.

I do it because I can make nice things for my family and friends, unique things that have a lot of meaning to them. It's not possible to monetize what I do because what I do only works because it's not monetizable.