Again, I am going to agree with you that some of the platforms out there provide opportunities for people to earn money while not being beholden to the traditional 9 - 5 office job. That's great for a lot of people in and of itself. (That said, many of the things you just rattled off are really not what we are talking about, in terms of "influencers" and "content creators", which was the primary focus both of my comments and the original article... but marketplace platforms and gig economy are natural talking points in this.)
Unfortunately, you have been snookered by the shiny objects of "some people have done well on these platforms" and "people can use these platforms to earn money when and where they see fit" and don't understand just how brutally exploitive they are. Which is exactly how these platforms work. Why do you think none of the content sites like YouTube, Medium, and TikTok publish average and median payouts to the creators, for example? It's because they know that if people see that only a very small handful of people are making more than a few dollars a year on them, no one would give them what is effectively free labor.
If you think the traditional corporatist system stinks, these tools are the raw, unfiltered hyperefficient capitalist system, fully realized. It gets worse, because at least in the Ron Paul or Ayn Rand paradise version of capitalism, a truly "free market" depends deeply on transparency, that there can be no "free market" when one side is hiding information, that the other party cannot truly "consent" to a contract when information is hidden, but that's exactly how most of these platforms work! They hide the payment algorithms from you. You aren't told, "you'll get X cents per click" or "you will get paid $Z to do this task", instead you find out after you have put in significant resources into the job. Uber, for example, tells you where you are taking someone after you have put in the time and effort to get to where they are to pick them up, you have already lost time and money without even knowing what the pay is. Anything run by Google, forget it, even their advertisers don't know what they will pay for a click until that click occurs.
Even worse, these tools depend on you, the worker, fronting the capital expenses *and* the operational expenses to them, and instead of paying you back with interest like any other similar business arrangement, they take a percentage out of your revenue. On top of that, because they are treating the workers as 1099 contractor or corp-to-corp arrangements, they offset all of the legal and regulatory risk to you.
The icing on the cake? The decades upon decades of legal protections... not just for the workers, but for consumers, environment, taxes, etc. that have been fought for? These companies get to bypass all of it. How do you think Uber got so successful for fast, for example? It's because they dodged all of the legal requirements around operating a taxi company even though they are a taxi company pretending to not be a taxi company. So while a legitimate taxi driver needs to comply with all sorts of rules from licensing to insurance to vehicle inspection to taxation to billing customers in a fair manner... Uber doesn't have to do any of that.
There's a saying that's apt here: if you don't know who the mark is, you are the mark. You are the mark. The fool. The sucker. The target. The victim. The prey. That's how companies like YouTube, TikTok, the Apple and Google App Stores, Medium, Instagram, Twitter, and on and on and on look at you. The stock market loves them because they get people like you to put in the time and effort and expense of generating their inventory - whether that be content to put on the home page, a registered and insured vehicle waiting at the airport to drive someone to the hotel, a cute stuffed animal to sell - and they don't have to pay you until the customer pays. They have unloaded 100% of the risk to you, which you gladly accept in exchange for the hope of one day achieving financial independence working on your schedule doing something you love without the headaches of a traditional job. You think you are getting your independence, but really you are giving these vampires a free ride.
I can't say it enough, these platforms prey upon people the same way MLMs do. So much of the business model is the same, so much of the draw to people (especially those who are in a situation where physically showing up to a workplace 9 - 5 M - F is a challenge) is the same. The marketing is the same. They dangle someone who reminds you of yourself in front of you and say "this person made big bucks using our tools working on their schedule, you can too". Except just like the MLM, that kind of success is reserved for the 1%.
Your motives for wanting these platforms to be a path for people are good, and I agree with them. But you have been absolutely, utterly, completely fooled by them. I am not sure what more I could show you to explain this to you, or help you to understand how these platforms are just not a viable path for most people. As I said in my original comment, the failings of the traditional system don't make these platforms viable. Those failings just make these platforms even more attractive. But you are the mark.
J.Ja
