Surviving the Algorithm: Digital Labor and Platformized Strategies of Short Video Creators

Abstract

Short Video platform has formed a new class of cultural producers who work under conditions influenced more by algorithms rather than their employers' will, contract terms and actual control capabilities. Based on the theoretical framework of platform capitalism, digital labour theory and algorithmic power, this paper uses publicly accessible DataReportal data and academic studies over a period of 20 years to examine the Digital labour of short-video creators. Three interrelated arguments will be presented as follows: first, short-video creation is one form of digital labour whose exploitative aspects are concealed behind the discourse on creative entrepreneurship; second, Algorithmic visible Mechanisms generate systemic Conditions of precarity that creatos must constantly manage; Third, The survival strategies which Creatos have been cultivating in reaction - Content optimisation, Self-quantityization, Emotion Labor, and Platform Diversification - bear Costs that the celebratory rhetoric of the creator economy never mentions. Based on this, it can be seen that some problems have emerged in the current management structure of Taobao Live shows.