Amateur web creators faced burnout because content production needs paid labor

Evidence

Lawrence Lessig, the darkest of the bunch, would turn out to be the one asking the most pertinent question: how long can this last? For even in the golden age of the user-driven web, there was reason to wonder whether the noncommercial model could persist. Bloggers and other creators of content were not Renaissance aristocrats; they faced the material constraints of most individuals or small-scale enterprises—most still needed to make a living, and as things progressed and improved, and expectations rose, it took ever more work to keep a blog up to date and engaging. A few would make a decent living, some through advertisings, others through newspaper acquisition. But for most, the effort would remain a hobby, and a time-consuming one at that. Burnout and attrition were perhaps inevitable. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 922

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Voluntary user content creation constitutes unpaid labor enriching platform owners — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 338; Platform ‘gamified’ labor substitutes token payments and rankings for wages — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 1034; The web enabled mass amateurization of creative work formerly reserved for professionals — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 905 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Paid professional staff displaced amateur bloggers in the attention economy #corroborates (0.90) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 969
• Building an attention-grabbing Instagram feed required unpaid laborious audience-engagement work #exemplifies (0.82) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1047