Incentives and motivations
on a platform like YouTube, the users are split into probably two major camps. There's the camp of people who just love the creation process and they make videos to express their creativity and they don't care about the platform itself. Those are the people who'd make videos even if YouTube wasn't a thing. And then there's the camp of people who see YouTube as a career or a business opportunity. They're in the game to make money and if a path to that is to just copy other people's content and thumbnails so be it.
Manuel puts his finger on something I’ve long felt around how I curate my RSS feed. I would estimate this is the makeup of my feed:
- 70% are individuals who blog to blog — no underlying monetization to their personal feed, they do it because they like to (e.g. Manuel himself).
- 20% are individuals whose blog constitutes some part of their business (e.g. Josh Comeau’s personal site, or Harry Roberts at CSS Wizardry)
- 10% are companies who exist as a business and have a blog (e.g. Netlify’s blog)
I like to stay abreast of what’s hot, but the real interesting, varied stuff comes from individuals who will “not stop doing what they do because they simply enjoy the process of creation”. Their content is more than just variations on a press release of whatever’s mainstream in tech at the moment.