WHEN THE PLATFORM IS THE CLIENT — AND THE THIEF
May 18, 2025
What if a lawyer no longer met their client, but handed their case files to YouTube? What if someone broke into your home, took your creative work, promised fair compensation — and just never delivered? This isn’t fiction. This is the daily reality for millions of content creators. We don’t own the platform. We don’t own the audience. And we don’t own the terms. When you can’t negotiate your price, protect your reach, or even prove your value — what’s left to own, except your burnout? I wrote this as a warning. And a reckoning.
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YOU BRING THE CASE, THEY TAKE THE CASH — AND LEAVE YOU WITH THE BURNOUT
Take a lawyer. A lawyer earns money because their time has value. They meet their clients, set their fees, and are paid for every hour worked. That’s why they have offices, good equipment, tailored clothes — because their profession pays. Now imagine that law worked like YouTube. The lawyer doesn’t meet the client anymore. The lawyer meets YouTube. YouTube meets the client. YouTube takes the money. And the lawyer gets nothing — or maybe a few coins. In this version of the world, the lawyer wouldn’t have a proper office, or nice clothes, or financial stability. They’d look exactly like many full-time creators today: overqualified, underpaid, exhausted, and invisible. If video production followed the same structure as law — say €120/hour — YouTube would have to make content genuinely profitable before acquiring it. Creators would be professionals with autonomy and fair rates. But instead, creators hand over both their work and their clients to a machine that doesn’t pay — and calls it a platform.
Now imagine this: it’s the middle of the night. You’re asleep. A thief breaks into your house. He doesn’t take your jewelry or your wallet — he takes your tapes. Your creative work. He doesn’t steal it out of passion. He takes it to become the only one allowed to exploit it commercially — without ever paying you. The next day, he comes back. You hand him the key. You give him the code to the safe. He smiles and says: “If your videos are worth anything, you’ll be compensated fairly. We have a monetization system.” Meanwhile, he generates millions. He shows your videos selectively. He suppresses your reach. And he convinces you that no one cares — so that he doesn’t have to share anything. It’s not just your content that was taken. It’s your ability to prove its worth. This isn’t a partner. It’s a slot machine. Everything is designed to maximize its revenue. Nothing is designed to sustain the people who make it run.
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YOUTUBE DOESN’T EARN ITS CUT
The cut YouTube takes isn’t justified by any kind of visibility. People say, “They take 30%, but at least they bring you an audience.” No — they don’t bring anyone. They host my videos, and I have to do all the work to attract viewers myself. Only after I’ve already generated traffic do they start treating me as worth promoting — not to help, but to feed more users into a system that’s already profitable for them. If I don’t build the mill myself, they won’t bring the water. They won’t even help me build it. They only show up when the harvest is good — and only to pick the fruit. Meanwhile, they discard what they consider to be “bad crops,” even when the fruit is perfectly fine. This isn’t failure. It’s industrial-scale waste — of labor, energy, and money that doesn’t belong to them.
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||#HSLdiary #HSLmichael
I wrote an update-summary post about the European anti-immigrant/-Muslim disinformation grift operations that I have been investigating on X, including recent events in Ireland and Wales, and connecting it to the misinformation-targeted riots across the UK last summer.
