While metrics have long played an important, albeit fraught, role in the media and cultural industries, quantified indices of online visibility—likes, favorites, subscribers, and shares—have been indelibly cast as routes to professional success and status in the digital creative economy. Against this backdrop, this study sought to examine how creative laborers’ pursuit of social media visibility impacts their processes and products. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 30 aspiring and professional content creators on a range of social media platforms—Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and Twitter—we contend that their experiences are not only shaped by the promise of visibility, but also by its precarity. As such, we present a framework for assessing the volatile nature of visibility in platformized creative labor, which includes unpredictability across three levels: (1) markets, (2) industries, and (3) platform features and algorithms. After mapping out this ecological model of the nested precarities of visibility, we conclude by addressing both continuities with—and departures from—the earlier modes of instability that characterized cultural production, with a focus on the guiding logic of platform capitalism.

虽然指标长期以来在媒体和文化行业中扮演着重要的角色，尽管令人担忧，但在线可见度的量化指数（喜欢、收藏、订阅和分享）已不可磨灭地成为数字创意经济中职业成功和地位的途径. 在此背景下，本研究试图检验创意劳动者对社交媒体知名度的追求如何影响他们的流程和产品。通过在一系列社交媒体平台（Instagram、YouTube、TikTok、Pinterest 和 Twitter）上对 30 位有抱负的专业内容创作者进行的深入采访，我们认为他们的体验不仅受到可见度承诺的影响，还受到它的不稳定性. 因此，我们提出了一个框架，用于评估平台化创造性劳动中可见性的波动性，其中包括三个层面的不可预测性：(1) 市场，(2) 行业，以及 (3) 平台功能和算法。在绘制出这种嵌套的可见性不稳定的生态模型之后，我们总结了与早期的文化生产特征的不稳定模式的连续性和背离，重点是平台资本主义的指导逻辑。