Legitimacy Lost

The result is a dynamic in which platforms exercise near-autocratic control over the creators that frequent their platforms. YouTube can demonetize high-profile creators at will. TikTok can ban its biggest stars indefinitely. Apple determines who gets to live in its App Store, and OnlyFans can dictate the morality of their creators to appease their... See more

But as we’ve seen, monetization is only one dimension to the platform legitimacy crisis. It’s not just about money: it’s about agency and autonomy, and having the opportunity to participate in decisions that directly impact your livelihood. It’s about breaking the unilateral power that platforms hold as centralized points of control in the ecosyste... See more

What are changes to platform monetization policies but a form of taxation without representation? What are creators if not a new category of labor, not unlike platform gig workers or factory workers from before, seeking protections for an emerging type of work that had previously never existed?

There are three areas in particular where founders looking to power the next generation of the platform economy should focus their efforts:

Creators are questioning the terms that govern their relationship with the platforms they frequent—and the right of the platforms to set those terms in the first place. How the ecosystem responds—what alternatives are proposed, who builds them, and how—will shape the next phase of the Creator Economy.

-Ownership and portability of data: Next-generation platforms have already begun shifting to more data-portable models. Substack, for example, gives writers total ownership over their audiences and allows them to take their email list of subscribers with them if they ever decide to leave the platform; furthermore, writers use their own Stripe accou... See more

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, wrote that “Legitimacy is a pattern of higher-order acceptance.” When enough people within the system question the system’s fairness it threatens the system's ability to continue to function, and you get a legitimacy crisis.

The first generation of these companies is already on the scene. Products like Patreon, Cameo and Substack have gained traction over the past several years by zeroing in on the monetization component of the problem, offering creators pathways to generating revenue directly from their audiences rather than relying solely on platform-controlled adver... See more

-Participatory decision-making and cooperative business models: From this standpoint, crypto tokens represent one of the most promising innovations for enabling ownership to be distributed and transferred on the internet as easily as information.