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One thing that perplexes me a bit is the weird veneration given to "content creators" these days, especially in gaming communities and similar. Does anyone have good insights into this? In particular, I've noticed that a lot of it is very easy to do (having done so myself), and also that people don't much do it.
An example:
There's a game that I play and do streams for sometimes. A while back I decided it would be cool to run an online ladder similar to the ones that I'd seen in a few other games. It was very easy to set up and probably took me a few hours of not-very-focused work, then once I ran it a bunch of people signed up and we had a tournament with streamed commentary for the top players at the end.
Recently I started playing another game, enjoyed it, and decided to duplicate my league format from the first game. This time it probably took me like 30 minutes to set up since I mostly just had to rewrite the rules from the first game. Already people are signing up, thanking me for organizing it, etc.
I don't get it. What's the big deal about stuff like this? I basically just copied a format that I'd seen others use successfully and adapted it a bit. It didn't take any technical skill whatsoever to do and many others could have done the same thing I did -- but nobody did.
Is the big thing about "content creators" just one of those "these are the people who bothered to show up" things, or what?
(I feel similarly about "maker culture" -- but at least there there's often some more interesting technical skill involved!)
Looking at myself, as someone who has done things adjacent to streaming in the past, and who has played a lot of video games at various times in my life, it may be informative to think about the reasons I don't stream: