I don't think that it's correct to pathologize this. Aghbad had a pretty clear radical vegan agenda to her output, and a history of campaigning in that space. She became angry that unilateral changes in YouTube policies wrecked her income stream and felt that Youtube and other firms engaged in non-transparent behavior to promote some content creators and suppress others.

Not many people saw her videos or site

Her site includes screenshots of videos with ~300k views/mo for which she received $0.10 in revenue. That's quite a respectable number for a fringe artist. I don't put out videos myself but I have to agree that $0.10 is a pretty crap payout for 300k views a monetizable video, and have long thought that YouTube's general lack of transparency about revenue is unfair to the people who use the platform. This is the basic problem of commercial platforms as described by our own patio11: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/939907045985107968?lang=e...

If they did she was probably just skipped over as "the weirdo"

It's weird to you but there's an audience for this style of art, which originates with a style called Vaporwave. It's deliberately lofi and DIY, and her web page points out that her (quite respectable) numbers of followers on various online platforms are organic rather than gained via SEO and so forth.

Look, the tech industry's basic invitation to content creators is "if you find your passion and build organic followings our blog/video/music platform will help you to monetize that relationship."

But the reality, and one I've been pointing out here for several years, is that online marketplaces tend to yield highly artificial bimodal income distributions rather than the approximate Pareto distributions that obtain in the natural world. We don't know how income is distributed on most platforms because the platform operators are not transparent about their pricing or revenue distribution, but it's not unreasonable to infer that different contributors are paid different rates for the same number of views depending upon their ability to drive ad growth, stickiness and other metrics. The problem for content creators is that the revenue is a black box, and so they're effectively playing a slot machine.

Monetizing content is a topic that often comes up on HN, and a frequent argument is that people shouldn't rely on view revenue but monetize with a Patreon, or selling merch, or using crowdfunding to support each project whose output is then later distributed free and so on. The problem for content creators is that the revenue model keeps changing and anyone who becomes invested in a business model is constantly playing catch-up as platform operators continually move the goalposts for all but the most successful contributors who are popular enough to negotiate a payout rate. It shouldn't be a surprise that if you put people in a state of constant economic anxiety then some of them will eventually snap and get mad about it. The lack of transparency or agency in digital micropayments is a stressor that platform operators choose to impose.

I want to be clear here that my argument is not that YouTube owed Aghbad an audience or popularity. Rather, she managed to cultivate an audience only to be told at some point that it was no longer eligible to be paid for and that her audience (~10k views a day) wasn't even worth the price of a sandwich.