Comment by jl6
5 years ago
I think these examples still support the broader hypothesis that creators are outliers and not representative of everybody else. Normal people don’t write books. Reading only books and not talking to normal people will give you a skewed impression of reality.
Even that statement "creators are outliers" doesn't really seem supported by the evidence from the article. Seems just as plausible that most people create in a singular or small set of domains, but consume from a much broader set.
I mean, sure, only .2% of visitors contribute to Wikipedia, but that's because Wikipedia has huge general applicability. I bet the 99.8% of non-contributors also includes the guy that streams on Twitch 12 hours a day, or folks who moderate Reddit forums, or lots of book authors.
Far from being "outliers", could be that most people just focus their creative pursuits on one thing.
Everyone creates, and most people write, a book isn't so different than a dairy or a blog. You could say TicToc creators are not normal people or Pinterest submitters, but I think the only time we see a cross section that does not represent the general population is when there is a high barrier to entry.
There is a phrase in Icelandic, "ad ganga med bok I maganum", everyone gives birth to a book. Literally, everyone "has a book in their stomach". One in 10 Icelanders will publish one, so in that society it's stastically normal to publish a book. But in any society it's normal to create and publishing is just one out of thousands of ways to do something everyone does.