Now in many other activities, people use "amateur" for somebody who does the job badly, and "professional" for somebody who does a much better job. In internet content creation I sometimes wonder whether the opposite isn't true. Of course there are good Youtube channels. But there are also Youtube content creators who simply take popular Reddit posts and read them as a script over some images. There are Youtube videos of the "... reacts to ..." variety, where the content creator simply rips off another popular video, with a small thumbnail of him watching the video and nodding his head as his only creative contribution. And since last year the number of AI-created Youtube content has been growing too.
There are now over 100 million active Youtube channels, so of course not all of them can be good. But to me it seems that the easy monetization leads to "professional" Youtubers just taking the path of least resistance, or in this case least creativity, to try to get some easy money. And the pile of garbage sometimes makes it hard to find the good stuff.
I don't like when people correlate amateur with bad and professional with good.
ReplyDeleteI'd say all of us have known professionals in our lines of work who do terrible quality work due to laziness or incompetence.
YouTube is the exact same. You have competent folks who put out quality content and lazy folks who put out trash content. Like anything else doing good work is often difficult and people look for shortcuts. Look at the recent drama of the hhbomberguy video where he calls out some huge channels for essentially plagiarizing their videos.
Tobold: "... amateur, which comes from the latin verb "amare", to love, because I do this content creation for the love of it."
ReplyDeleteInteresting, I didn't know that is where the word amateur comes from. As you say, it paints the word in a very different light.
Nowadays in the USA I think we use the word passion to describe what we love to do.