This isn't purely new, either. I'm perhaps dating myself a bit but I recall that over the years I have seen a few actors have this weird vibe where they're never "human", they always "on" and seem like their actor-thing has totally subsumed their humanity.

David Cassidy and Shirley McClain come to mind for me on this.

I built a few mobile games for iOS and Android.

I launched my first game in 2015 which took 6 months to even reach $100/month. From there it earned around $500/month for the last 7 years. It required a huge upfront investment, ongoing updates to keep relevant and a significant fraction of revenue going into advertising.

I launched a few additional games that were low quality and ended up removing them. I started another 4-5 ideas that were abandoned.

In 2021, during a few month break from my job, I produced one more game that has averaged around $2000/month revenue for the last 2 years. Also needs regular updates and promotion to stay relevant.

Overall I would only recommend this route if you’re really passionate about game dev. The overall time investment has been really high, and it isn’t truly passive income because mobile games lose users quickly when not updated often.

Started making simple games in college, later started making simple apps and games. Figured out ways to monetize them later. Most of the money comes from a small niche users for app / small number of regular players for games. So basically I build stuff for fun and later pivoted a bit to monetize them, like adding extra features or selling ad space.

A short story: I once was recruited by an acquaintance to work on the social media campaign of a local politician contesting for the governorship election. Mind you, this isn't the US or any western country but a third-world nation. I was a college student on break, so it was an easy way to make some money...nothing wrong I thought.

Well, time to start work, and it turns out it isn't as straightforward as I thought. This social media campaign involved creating fake Twitter accounts with AI-generated photos as profile pictures and pushing stories supporting the politician. I've always hated social media and wasn't too familiar, so I thought, does this even work?

Well, yeah, it worked. We pushed frankly bogus stories and overtly biased posts and many of them got to the Twitter front page for users in my country. Even I was shocked how those posts had a considerable impact, and the politician ended up winning the election.

This work thought me a great lesson; quit social media because you're being manipulated everywhere. Mind you, this was a small operation with less than two dozen persons. Imagine what someone with a massive budget, let's say Putin or MBS, could achieve by building a propaganda farm employing thousands...It's definitely hard to discern truth when everyone is being fed a large stream of propaganda at every second.

As for me, I quit social media or any type of news...I'm not confident in my abilities to discern truth when there are dedicated teams of psy-op operators trying to manipulate me. If you think you're smart enough to counter such efforts, good luck to you, but as for me, I think the human brain did not evolve to handle mass media positively.