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Why? What's wrong with, for example, someone making YouTube videos and being paid a living wage for it? I'm genuinely curious about where this negative attitude towards these people is stemming from.
I think it's close to equal parts jealousy and legitimate distaste for rewarding popularity for popularity sake. So much of the toxic behavior of the popular cliche in high school makes it into the environment that it dilutes the legitimate utilization of the platform for making actually good content.
That, and the possibly justifiable hated for what some people are now considering, by extension, 'good content' when it all just ends up being reaction videos and meta content about content about content to the point where it's just a bunch of rich assholes acting like rich assholes and that's literally the content.
Honestly the worse trend I've seen are the channels that are effectively 'bum fights' with marginally less crude concepts. Let's see how humiliated we can make my friends act for a tiny bit of money compared to how much I'm making is not, and has never been, a nice thing to do, and the platform has turned it into a lucrative job.
In that case one should then be more specific about what it is exactly that they dislike rather than just treating the whole "profession" of content creation as if there weren't levels to it. Most of even objectively bad content is still harmless. Getting annoyed by it is bordering on self-harm as nobody is forcing anyone to consume that content. That's kind of like someone getting angry at my Lemmy post for not being entertaining to them.
I too dislike inauthenticity, vanity, consumerism, and low-effort content made primarily to farm engagement but for the most part I just don't pay any attention to it. I'm not against people being into stuff that I'm not for as long as it's not harming anyone else. And yes, in some extreme cases content creation can be that as well.
It could be described as something between linkedinzation and bullshitification, you know, that thing of trying to make everything grandeur and more important because you want to fool somebody you are more than what you actually are... a guy telling the news is an anchor, a guy commenting on the news is a commentator, a guy hosting a talk show is a talk show host, a guy talking about music or movies or video games is a critic, a guy that has a variety show is a host or entertainer, a guy telling jokes is a comedian, there used to be columnists, journalists, bloggers, chroniclers, investigative reporters... a person with no particular talent, skill and function and that's famous for absolute no reason? We used to call them socialites... but these are not enough, these doesn't sound grandeur enough , so any jackass recording a conversation with friends now is a "creator" and an "influencer", and I have zero respect for the whole of it and I pity those who buys into and normalize this bullshitification
I get the frustration with people inflating their own importance with fancy titles. That part is fair.
Where I push back is treating “content creator” as if it’s automatically a bullshit term. To me, it’s just a broad, neutral description - it means someone who makes videos, podcasts, or other material for an audience. It doesn’t imply skill, value, or prestige by itself. You can be a great content creator or a terrible one, just like you can be a great journalist or a terrible one.
Tom Scott is a content creator. So is some guy filming himself ranting in his car. The term covers both. The fact that a lot of low-effort stuff exists under that label doesn’t make the category itself meaningless - it just means the barrier to entry is low and the incentives reward volume.
I don't know Tom Scott but he seems to be what we used to call an essayist. When people started posting short essays on the internet they were called web logs, that soon were popularly called blogs, and then came the video logs, or vlogs, so Tom Scott sounds like a vlogger, and I can respect a vlogger essayist who uses YouTube or whatever as a platform to post his video logs (as I can respect a critic, a journalist, a commentator, etc).
"Content Creator" is an umbrella term that actually means nothing, it's for anyone posting anything on pages or channels and they came up with this bullshit term to make it sound grandeur. A guy posts a video commenting about how a barista got his name wrong in the cafeteria or films himself reacting to another video and you are witnessing "Creation"... oh, fuck off, sorry for you kids that grew up with this bullshit being normalized, but I don't buy into it, "Content Creator" is the title given to someone that really can't use any other title (like the several I mentioned in the previous comment - chronicler, comedian, host, entertainer, artist, etc etc), and if one uses the title they are purposely putting themselves in the same category as the guy filming himself reacting to other videos, and I will treat them equally. If I shake hands with someone and they introduce themselves as a Content Creator (or even worse, an Influencer), I will wipe my hand right in front of that person. Fuck corpo newspeak.