alt Hacker News>, I wish Sabine Hossenfelder didn't have to leave academia. [...] I understand that she is catering to the audience but this is one example why alignment of the incentives works. Before, she was earning her living as a working physicist so she did not have to cater to anyone actually
But this obscures the fact that she was still "catering to the audience" when working in academia as a paid physicist. She was just placating a different audience and worked on topics she really didn't think was groundbreaking just to keep the grant money rolling in. The misalignment of incentives just happened outside of Youtube.
Deep link to her explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8&t=4m37s
A lot of viewers wish that "content creator" wasn't a thing and people just did Youtube for free as a hobby. Understandable. But what viewers don't realize is that it's also actually saying this: "Please continue being unhappy in your crappy day job so you don't need to live off money from Youtube ads or sponsorships."
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Her personal motivations make total sense and this isn’t a judgment of her, but your comment makes it sound a little like misaligned incentives just switched places, but the misaligned research incentives remain (and she doesn’t do research professionally anymore) and now she introduced a new misalignment: the content creation business.
It’s totally fair that emotionally she was done with one and able better to continue work with the other, but removing the hobby element actually did remove one set of well aligned incentives and did not replace them with another.
> But what viewers don't realize is that it's also actually saying this: "Please continue being unhappy in your crappy day job so you don't need to live off money from Youtube ads or sponsorships."
But the reverse is also true: Not for everybody being content creator is the dream job. Some like creating something once in a while, but otherwise enjoy their life and job.
Please continue being unhappy in your crappy day job so you don't need to live off money from Youtube ads or sponsorships.
The problem is that we shouldn’t be a society where most day jobs are crappy and where we accept that because people who are “not entrepreneurial” deserve to suffer.
We could have been all sorts of things. We chose Office Space and then we chose influencer grift.
Not all day jobs need to be crap of course. I enjoy mine and I like to produce some content on the side.
It's hard to get people to find it though due to the platforms all promoting professionals from which they earn more. But on the other hand I don't really care either.
Even if we installed fully automated communism and nobody had to work crappy day jobs to feed themselves anymore, the inherent human drive for fame and approval of one's peers would probably still make people placate their audiences to an extent. It's probably just inescapable
Personally, I don't mind that "content creator" is a thing, but what irks me is that, at least in the Youtube I see, "content creator" is the ONLY thing.
If I search for ANYTHING, I get a tutorial, or tips, or some clickbait like "I had no idea about this!" Every video is by someone whose job is Youtube. The giveaway is that all of them have custom thumbnails. Someone who just made a random video about something and posted on the free video platform wouldn't even have bothered getting a custom thumbnail for it. You can't find those videos, at all. At this point it wouldn't surprise me if a custom thumbnails was a requirement for the algorithm to consider your video even if it isn't spelled out anywhere.