The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

They need to talk about the network effect, and where the power is centered here. Hint - its not with the content creators, nor the users. Its the platform. Its the rent-seeking behavior on the part of the platforms that causes every entry in this space to rise when there&#x27;s investment money, and then fall when they have to start making the money back and implement creator and user unfriendly mechanisms. Then the content creators have to replatform, which can lose them much of their audience.<p>We can break the cycle with self-hosted platform-agnostic tools. Most everything these platforms do is available off the shelf - the differentiations don&#x27;t actually matter. The content creators aren&#x27;t being given an audience, they build audiences for the platform. Everything the platform does once it has to start making money is in service to the platform and the investors, not the &quot;workers&quot;, or the users.

Yeah, I’d like to see median earnings numbers here.<p>Passion is great for hobbies. Passion should not be an ingredient or path to being a good employee or being a good citizen. Rigor yes, dedication, sure. Passion (I.e. suffering as it were), no, no that is that companies who want to milk you tell you, of managers who want to extract more from you and away from work life balance say. Sorry, but no.

I don&#x27;t think the economy in this segment is changing drastically. Top handful of rockstars, actors, athletes, soccer players, etc were always compensated very well, while the median ones weren&#x27;t. Not like you can get a <i>Master in Talk Show Hosting</i> degree and get a more or less predictable career path similar to the engineering&#x2F;medicine degrees.<p>Come to think of it, the rise of multiple competing content platforms would actually lower the top performers&#x27; revenues due to the audience splintering.<p>Given that A16Z likely holds some stake in the mentioned businesses, I would treat this as simply another piece of marketing material for some upcoming IPOs.

God I hate this stuff. It preaches the wrong ideas to people and then screws them up for life.<p>We need to think less about “the future of work” and think more about “the history of work”.<p>What people need to embrace is the Discipline Economy. It’s simple. Find something that is of value to society and pays enough, then work everyday to be better and better at it until you reach your maximum potential, and you will be rewarded. No passion required. You just get up and do it, every workday. And at the end of the day, clock out and go do whatever you want.<p>You don’t need to be doing something you like, you need to be doing something that sustains you. If that also happens to be something you like, then that is a gift, similar to being tall, or smart, or attractive. Life will be easier for you then, but that is not the default. Someone still has to shovel the piles of shit or dig a ditch.<p>The Passion Economy appeals to people who don’t ask what they can do for society, but rather what society can do for them. It’s selfish, and unsustainable. Passion doesn’t last forever. Discipline does.

Selecting a few outliers and calling it a “trend” is ridiculous.<p>Honestly I wish there was a stricter policy on HN for posting corporate content marketing puff pieces. These a16z blog posts do nothing more than hype companies in their portfolio.

This describes how one can use individuality and a platform to provide a labor like podcasting, youtubing, online teaching, etc. It describes how it works and the shape of this industry.<p>It doesn&#x27;t go into how feasible making a living income is actually, merely highlights the top earners in specific platforms... Rather suspicious to me.

They start the first paragraph saying &quot;The TOP earning writer here makes X ...&quot; then &quot;The TOP content creator there makes Y ...&quot; The second paragraph says &quot;This is INDICATIVE of ...&quot; How does the logical fallacy here not occur to them? That they use a MAXIMUM to describe a distribution in the way that a person who is not completely out of touch with reality would use a median or mean. Silicon Valley megalomania par excellence.

&gt; The top-earning writer on the paid newsletter platform Substack earns more than $500,000 a year from reader subscriptions.<p>By contrast, 99.99% of writers earn either nothing or very little from their &quot;passion&quot;, because approximately nobody has the time and interest to read all of their stuff. It&#x27;s a terrible career choice that people should be dissuaded from more actively.<p>I would imagine it&#x27;s the same or similar for all other &quot;passion gigs&quot;.

The reason that A16z is taking about top earners rather than median is that their audience is the people building the platforms. These people care about the total revenue which you&#x27;d expect to be a power law distribution dominated by the top earners, so the max is the most important number.

We should think about what is going to happen to all those people (let&#x27;s face it, the vast majority) who are not passionate about anything... Or worse; who are simply not quite passionate enough...<p>Taking into account a competitive global environment with many traditional&#x2F;productive jobs disappearing and being replaced by a much smaller number of extremely hard-to-get content creator jobs, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s going to end well. It&#x27;s starting to look like that Black Mirror episode where people end up living in a box and generaring electricity with their legs.

Global &quot;passion economy&quot; sounds like the devaluation of creative work. Look no further than fiverr

Anyone know where to hook up technical writing gigs? We dont have stripe in my country so I cant get payouts on medium. I used to write for an Elasticsearch blog. Would love to get paid for technical articles. I got a whole portfolio and plenty of passion.

Here&#x27;s how you solve the health insurance crisis. The hard part is getting doctors to learn marketing, or having personalities.

Strange that UFC has the same exact reward model.

We wrote an article on this topic and we call it The Talent Economy - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;topt.al&#x2F;kcV6G" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;topt.al&#x2F;kcV6G</a><p>We believe our arguments are a bit more pointed and speak to the dynamics of the gig economy vs. [name your catchy other economy here].

They lost me at the word &quot;enterprization.&quot;

My hunch is that for the &quot;gig economy&quot; to become anything more than worker exploitation, they will need to be restructured as commons-owned P2P networks where earnings and value are ~equally distributed.<p>It&#x27;s absurd for 0.01% of popular, early-adopter creators to be making $millions on these platforms while 99.99% with the same output quality and skills struggle to earn enough to cover a fraction of their living costs.<p>But of course equal wealth distribution and commons ownership is a blindspot that the Silicon Valley sociopaths will never pursue.

And, as usual, creatives who are unpopular because they&#x27;re lousy at marketing themselves get bupkis. Capitalism, fuck yeah!

Complete and total nonsense. &quot;Passion&quot; is a buzzword meaning work for free until we deem you worthy of payment - and that time frame keeps getting longer and longer as the race to the bottom in labor keeps happening. NAFTA was a prelude to the internet revolution. Like programming? Well, someone living where rent is a tenth of yours can do it better than you. Enjoy poverty!

Whenever you gauge the performance of any activity, there is a bell curve distribution of ability.<p>A very small portion become superstars and a majority fall somewhere in the middle, this is a natural phenomena.<p>What these platforms have allowed to happen is allowed individuals to capture more of the value they individually produce, with the result being these creators with abilities to perform BEYOND the average do much better.<p>Of course you don&#x27;t see the natural selection cycle - the fact that many do not perform as well, and need to find some other - low competition - arena to express themselves in. In which they can perform more efficiently to capture more value for themselves. Typically in high competition environments it becomes harder and harder to make a profit.<p>These concepts should be obvious, I find it therefore distasteful and deplorable that one could somehow demean these platforms by saying that they &quot;create a small number of superstars who earn orders of magnitude more than the average creator, with all other creators getting a relative pittance&quot;. They question the metrics the individuals who voted with their time and money used to decide &quot;merit&quot; because they didn&#x27;t win by those metrics.