What’s frustrating is it takes a engineer-y substack think piece to draw attention to it.
Contrary to memes about YouTube enabling creators, many musicians, artists, app creators, and importantly journalists can speak to how tech has radically cheapened and homogenized content and driven down margins.
For every bracelet maker that gets discovered on Insta/Etsy, there are many:
- musicians needing to use Spotify for exposure, and getting Spotify margins. At the worst version, the first 30 secs of a song are designed to make you not click next in Spotify.
- artists competing with cheap but popular Insta content that cheapens the concept
- journalists writing for clicks to compete with cheap clickbait content
- if you remember one thing, this is it: journalists losing W2 career options and forced into contracting, and by extension loss of libel lawsuit protection from their parent paper, due to margins dropping for those media outlets due to cheap content elsewhere. This occurs at very large papers and outlets, and it’s a silencing effect.