At first, you have the early adopters. Things grow organically and it doesn't feel like a zero-sum game because there aren't many players.
Next comes the growth phase, where more people get involved, and start competing for attention/clicks/votes/whatever points system.
Next comes the exploiters, who discover weaknesses in the system and take advantage of them. They tend to make a lot of money because there's not much competition in this niche.
Next comes the crossover, where the exploit knowledge becomes public, and everyone now must do it because everyone else is.
Next comes the shutout, where the company running things starts actively punishing bad actors, but by this time, being a bad actor is essential to survival, so people do it anyway. It becomes a game of cat-and-mouse, new exploits, new mitigations.
Eventually, the company manages to fix their algorithms enough that the exploits don't offer decent marginal returns anymore, and it returns to what the company originally intended: 1% of people are successful, 99% of people make next to nothing, and the company makes shitloads.
And then the new big thing comes out. The old system goes into decline and the new system starts to take over. Rinse and repeat.
You're describing society. Any free "social" system, virtual or otherwise, can and will attract the same ingredients and the outcome will be a strong approximation of a normal society.
Apologies if this is too meta, but all the claims of "ugh so glad I don't care about social media" and "what do influencers am I right????" feel really, really disingenuous on a forum run by a silicon valley incubator, where discussions of building products that run on advertisements regularly take place.
I think there's a deeper truth that most people, including us here on HN, don't want to admit: humans are at not rational, logical beings; rather we are emotional decision makers who largely don't understand our own opinions and preferences, where they come from, or how much "influence" comes from sources outside ourselves.
The next time you decide on a particular brand of product, or vote for a particular politician, ask yourself: why do I think this? Why do I have these beliefs about how the world works, about how society should be organized, or about why people should act this way?
At this point it's almost a truism to say ads work. How is the "influencer game" different from ads? A trusted source shows a product or service, and some percentage of the followers buy it.
A platform has hundreds of millions of users. Some do anything necessary to capture as big a slice of that audience, and monetize it.
This may be a revelation for Joe Average who knows nothing of the ad-driven-startup world, but it shouldn't be a surprise to us.
There is a deeper truth that marketing people (like yourself I am guessing?) don't want to admit: what you do is wrong. To it's very core. You're attempting to take away people's free will, using the dirtiest tactics one could imagine. Emotional manipulation, exploiting peoples insecurities, their need to feel a certain level of status from their peers: these are staple tactics of a marketer, and social media influencers are the most horrid incantation of this dystopian reality.
Note that I distinguish marketing from mere ads, which (one hopes) are just trying to impart information. I have no problem with you saying you have skateboard for sale at $50. When you pay a 19yr old model to stand there looking cool with a sultry look on her face, thats not advertising, its manipulation. Sure it works, its even legal, but it's a very evil thing.
https://youtu.be/_86qb7hlbJI says it all (only 50 second long and very funny, be sure to check out his other stuff - comedy is usually greatest when its saying something true).
Advertising - including subsets of advertising like including models or playing on insecurities - is only a small subset of the discipline of "Marketing". Most of Marketing is about finding out what people want and need, how to deliver it, and how to let people know your delivery of their need-fulfillment is available.
Gimmicks are only needed if you can't figure out what people need or can't deliver it.
Bringing this up because Silicon Valley would be building much better products if our venture-funded companies hired marketers - not marketers who work on advertisements, social media, etc, I know we hire plenty of those - But the kind of marketers who rigorously research consumer needs and creatively find ways the technical capacity of companies can be deployed to meet those needs. User testing is only a small subset of market research, and it's sloppy, lazy, and ultimately very shortsighted to limit market research to user testing and data mining.
Free will is highly overstated though: as the parent comment said, everything you think and believe and thus do is linked to a particular social context. That's true for the stuff you buy, the stuff you believe in, the things you think are "wrong" or "right" or "normal" or "abnormal". When you start looking/living in other societies you realise that all of these is just cultural norms.
So if we wanted to disprove that, we need to find this one guy that is in the same social groups but believes something fundamentally different?
I think this is overgeneralized and the effect that people agree on a set of believes/values/rules isn't a good indicator of the presence of free will. There might be other mechanisms involved.
But it makes a difference whether you are part of creating a society within which a entities fortune is based on exploiting (and feeding into) the believes of gullible victims or whether you try to create a society in which you try to bring out the best from within the people.
The latter is some sort of humanism, that ultimately resulted in all the things we collectively seem to value about western societies, while the former is more or less responsible for the biggest problems we have.
So even if free will turns out a complete illusion, it would still matter how people treat each other based on that idea. Usually you can amend it to: “Free will is an illusion, at least for those poor idiots who have nobody but themselves to blame for it, which is why it is socially acceptable for me to exploit them”
(This is not aimed at you, it is just a thought that crossed my mind, when I read your comment)
> You're attempting to take away people's free will, using the dirtiest tactics one could imagine
I flipped open at random the other day the book 'Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion' and was a bit disturbed by what I read. It was about a particular way of starting a conversation in order to manipulate someone into then finding it difficult to resist your next conversational gambit, with the obvious end goal of parting them from their money against their better judgement or similar. I want to get rich one day and get out, but is this what I need to become to do it?!
Everything that we do in life is a form of marketing and PR. The very way we present ourselves to the world, our body language, how we dress, make up, color and style our hair, stuff that we talk about, it's all an attempt to sell ourselves as better and smarter and sexier than the competition, and we all do it all the time. And for all of us at least part of it is really just plain fake. If you'd apply the same rules used for commercial products on all those happy couples, perfect housewives, cool bros having crazy adventures that you can see all over Facebook, Instagram, etc. they'd all be charged for false advertising. So don't be that hard on people trying to sell you skateboards...
Don't tar everyone with the same brush. There are a lot of people out there who figured out that life is much better when you drop the facade and social media glitz. For obvious reasons they don't exactly shout it from the rooftops, they just go on living their own lives in their own way, detached from advertising, trends and fads.
Marketing is poison, and the sooner a person learns to ignore it and do their own thing instead, the happier they'll be.
I make it a point not to sell myself in superficial ways. I'm privileged not to be hideous to look at, and am not completely uninvested in my image, but I don't chase trends or use self help book tips on how to make people like me. It doesn't really help me to be this way, but I am repulsed by the self perpetuating standard rituals of deference, attention seeking, and status signalling that seem to me to preclude what could be a more genuine form of interpersonal discovery.
I don't do anything for that reason. That sounds like a marketer's projection instead of any objective reality.
It also sounds like the Postmodernist Disease of the Science Wars assuming nothing is real while they write bullshit indistinguishable from a Markov Chain generator output.
The prevalence just shows that - not that it isn't pathological.
Advertising is unethical in my opinion when it lies or misleads, or it fosters fears and impulses that negatively impact individuals quality of life, or their social contribution and therefore others' QoL.
One example is advertising toys to kids during kids programming: most of this is done in a way that makes kids feel left out for not having the toys, relies on FOMO, envy, and molds susceptible children into more jealous and materialistic people. It misleads them with its imagery into thinking they will be extremely happy if they just have that thing.
I think that perhaps even the majority of what is done as accepted practice in advertising (across all its forms) is harmful, and further, it will stay that way because the $ales a campaign generates are the only measure of success as far as success is rewarded.
>Advertising is unethical in my opinion when it lies or misleads, or it fosters fears and impulses that negatively impact individuals quality of life, or their social contribution and therefore others' QoL
Hard to disagree with that, but this is very different from the parent poster's claim.
That depends if the ad is just presenting something or the marketeer engages in further "perception management" (I don't know the jargon).
This stuff, buying clicks, lobbying platforms to ban content you don't want to be associated with your product/service because it could distort its "cleanness".
Advertising is needed but there are a lot of valid reasons people don't like them very much.
It's an illusion to any given organism, from the outsiders meta kind of view, sure, but in the context of your own reality, it's real. Your decision making depends in ways on believing you have decisions to make. Not having a sense of free will can have some negative consequences, whether or not you believe we are actually deciding anything or just a function of our inputs.
> https://youtu.be/_86qb7hlbJI says it all (only 50 second long and very funny, be sure to check out his other stuff - comedy is usually greatest when its saying something true).
Let me guess, Bill Hicks, right? Anyway, this is a straw man of what marketing actually is.
Marketing is the process of finding out what a customer wants and finding the most efficient way to deliver it. What you've described is advertising.
Marketing isn't intrinsically evil. The positive side, for example, might be showing people how great switching to wireless headphones is going to be, (justifying the expense) and then hey what do you know these really are awesome!
Marketing at its best is helping people see how a product fills a need or makes their life better in a way that might not have been clear at first.
If people honestly wanted or needed a particular thing, then marketing would be irrelevant. We've been manufacturing demand to meet supply for decades now. It is fundamentally a disingenuous act.
You seriously want a Hunky Bill's Perogie Maker. The only reason you don't know that you want one is because you didn't grow up in Winnipeg. But trust me. You want one. It's a shame that you will read this on HN and you will dismiss it as a stupid joke and you almost certainly won't go out and order a Hunky Bill's Perogie Maker -- all because you didn't watch 100's of hours of cartoons on Saturday mornings in Winnipeg (or probably you'd be good in Regina or even Calgary... I'm not sure).
Yeah, it's crazy, but there is something noble about letting people know that there is good stuff that can help them in ways that they can't imagine yet. It's doubly good if that helps you run a business that makes a truly useful product.
I don't know anything about Hunky Bill (I just noticed he lived in Vancouver! WTH... Can I really trust him?) But that perogie maker. Yep. Good as gold.
But there is a difference between an opinion, like the earnest word of mouth bit concerning personal experience, and people paid entirely too much to convince strangers how incomplete they are. There was a lot of history before Bernays taught the western world to underestimate the universe. A return to landscapes free of billboards could be as therapeutic as aesthetic, but we'll never know that again.
I'll admit that I heartily agree with you there. I think my only point was that marketing is not inherently bad. It's just the extremes that we take it to.
Jesus surrounded himself with lepers, whores and thieves. I'm sincerely not trolling here, I just don't see a point in preaching only to the choir. I respect values of information here, like how Snowden landing in Honk Kong was announced here before any other website. But comfort zones, echo chambers, safe spaces and news bubbles are the same as any gated community, in that they block out most of reality by design. Including quite a lot of truth.
Thirty years ago nobody knew why they should care about the internet. Fifteen years ago nobody understood why they should get a smartphone. New technology often has to initially answer the question of "Why should I care", even if it's obvious in retrospect. You could wait around for people to figure it out on their own, or you could help them.
Just as an illustration, if you watched the show Silicon Valley, this was one of their big challenges. We made something brilliant, but hardly anyone understands why it matters.
What you call help is not what I would call help - using a wealth of scientific literature to design information that when conveyed can optimally take advantage of statistically likely emotional or physiological triggers to exploit people into buying something they didn't already want is evil.
Marketing as a concept could make some sense in information scarce environments like the era before global instant communication between anyone anywhere to any number of people. Since then, absolutely nobody has asked the question "I don't know what to spend my money on, I sure wish a corporation would suggest something".
> this was one of their big challenges. We made something brilliant, but hardly anyone understands why it matters.
Is this the "decentralized internet" product, or the initial Pied Piper product? SV the show is very accurate in some ways, but how did it take them until Season 2 to discover that average consumers don't give a crap about a hard-to-use, seemingly B2B-focused app that compresses their pictures?
No it isn't. It's just a shame that 99.99% of the industry are ruining it for the rest of them.
Advertising a new product or service is great, but showing me the ads over and over again is manipulation. Creating a brand to get people emotionally invested is manipulation. Almost the entire industry is manipulating people to buy something they didn't want, spend more than they should have (including the costs that marketing adds to the product) or trying to convince them to buy from you instead of someone else.
Marketing is a subset of the Exploitation Economy, which is effectively a global cult now.
Everything in the exploitation economy is evil. But then most previous attempts at large-scale human organisation have been evil too, in their own ways.
It's possible to have a humane non-exploitation economy, and it might even be possible for it to include some marketing. But it would look very different to the economy we have today.
How exactly is exploitation defined? That term has been awfully watered down to the point a miller buying wheat, grinding it to flour, and then selling the flour qualifies because the farmer doesn't get paid a second time - despite doing the miller doing useful work and the fact a farmer can always mill themselves with just flat stones if the deal is so bad.
They may be staple tactics, but they are by no means universal tactics. Just as you realize right from wrong, so do others. And some of us have to solve marketing problems.
> what you do is wrong. To it's very core. You're attempting to take away people's free will, using the dirtiest tactics one could imagine. Emotional manipulation, exploiting peoples insecurities, their need to feel a certain level of status from their peers: these are staple tactics of a marketer
For the record, this is not what marketing professionals do. What you are talking about is somewhere between black-hat advertising and lifestyle advertising (which is much deeper than "manipulation").
I personally like 'tptacek's definition of marketing (at least within the tech area he was in at the time):
> Marketing is product definition, awareness, lead gen, conversion, and then the measurement and improvement of same.
The cognitive dissonance in marketing starts very early. I read this book cover to cover in a previous startup life (1) because it was a recommended first year college text in marketing. I have it in front of me right now. They define marketing as "the process by which companied create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return" (page 5). Then, in chapter 15, they have a detailed case study spanning multiple pages of the "I'm a Mac"/"I'm a PC" ads Apple ran a few years ago. These are some direct quotes from that book, though I have shortened them somewhat, without changing any of the overall tone or message:
"The ads portrayed Mac as a young, hip, laid back guy in a hoodie, whereas PC was a stodgy, befuddled, error-prone, middle-aged nerd... not surprisingly, adroit and modern Mac always got the best of outdated and inflexible PC ... The campaign produced results... less than 2 years later its [market] share had doubled... the cool campaign also helped boost customer value perception... Good advertising wasn't the only thing contributing to Apple's success..."
That campaign clearly had nothing to do with 'creating customer value'. It was a smear campaign. Yet in the same textbook these marketing academics praise it as great advertising. There is a laughably tiny section on ethics (2 paragraphs) at the end of the chapter which simply has open-ended questions, no guided discussion or anything.
It should surprise no-one that marketers have a fantastic bullshit story to convince people marketing is some kind of force for good. It is after all their job. Most amusingly I think they have largely pulled the same trick on themselves.
--
For the record, this is not what marketing professionals do. What you are talking about is somewhere between black-hat advertising and lifestyle advertising (which is much deeper than "manipulation").
--
Marketing professionals absolutely use manipulative predatory tactics like that on the people they are trying to convince to buy their products. Just because you nonsensically try to suggest otherwise, doesn't magically make it so.
What's even less shocking is that it has real limitations in that, once trust is lost by a bad actor in one area of marketing, all other areas are suddenly seen as untrustworthy as well. That is the reason marketing only tends to work on younger people with little to no previous experience being targeted for the hard sell.
You can't distance yourself from people who use predatory advertising as a means to increase the "awarenes" metric any more than you can claim marketing isn't actually selling anything.....
> Marketing is product definition, awareness, lead gen, conversion, and then the measurement and improvement of same.
Don't forget the first step - research. Which involves either boots on the ground, offline, watching, talking to and interacting with people, or paying someone else to do it.
> feel really, really disingenuous on a forum run by a silicon valley incubator, where discussions of building products that run on advertisements regularly take place.
Just because they take place here doesnt mean everyone here is involved in these discussions.
I agree with influencers making a difference and we see something analogous to buying clicks here. This will distort perception further. Fringe topics will suddenly seem to be important to lot of (fake) people. This will distort perception heavily.
Influencers aren’t ads. Influencers are product placement.
Oh you thought it was a coincidence that every desk in MI5 has a Curvoiser bottle always pointing at the camera? Or that Black Panther chases a Mercedes not a Maseratti?
The funny thing is aggressive copyright law is to blame for it and lawyers forcing "brand x-ing".
Without it we might see more "organic" classification intended to reflect the character like the old noir smoking cliches. Sure there would be manipulations still but it wouldn't be approved as a norm and other intrusions like "don't show the fancy sports car getting dented after ramming a gunman at 120 mph".
There are different audiences out there and the "metrics" reflect some of them but not others.
Simplified version.
Type 1: Think that metrics (followers, friends, likes, reposts...) have meaning. Pursue that meaning. Have no effective moral structure. Maybe are dumb.
Type 2: Don't care about metrics. Find a way to get something that they actually like out of the systems. Have some moral structure.
Much discussion assumes that all users are dominated by their Type 1 side. Type 2's are invisible to the analyst.
Me I say. If everybody is genuinely Type 1 it's time to can "Project Mankind" and start again. Fortunately I know that there are Type 2's out there.
That's all fair enough. I think the root of the complaint is that the influencers that people find objectionable just aren't very good at influencing, however that may be defined. Nobody appreciates blatant, yet poorly executed, attempts at marketing.
This is what honestly terrifies me more than anything - being in a dire enough financial situation to need to do bullshit work and waste my short time on this Earth for food and shelter. In my experience meaningful jobs are in insanely high demand - they substantially underpay, require substantially more qualifications, and are much more scarce than adding another cog to the cancer of finance, advertising, or business service.
I'm currently doing the Digital Nomad thing, wandering around the world building a product.
So many "influencers" out there. Usually not only "growing their audience", but now running courses on "how to live your dream by becoming an Instagram Influencer while travelling". The industry appears to be eating itself (this is also true of the nomad thing, too - so many "coaches" and "mentors" out there who will teach you how to achieve the "nomad lifestyle").
I'm in the lucky position of being able to code for decent money while travelling, so I get to watch them hustle their arses off trying to make it work. I would not want to be in their position. The market is declining, the competitors are increasing, and the option of going home and getting a "normal" job again feels like total failure.
I get the rage in TFA's article, but all I feel is pity.
> "how to live your dream by becoming an Instagram Influencer while travelling"
Gosh, imagine how that traveling looks like, documenting every moment of it, creating all these fake, yet real looking spontaneous stories. I doubt that one can actually enjoy traveling like that, but maybe that's just me.
I was in Zermatt 2 weekends ago walking around the town when I suddenly heard behind me "Hello and welcome to my channel".
Turn around, see a posse of people around a guy pointing a serious camera at his face. I immediately felt bad for him, it felt so unnatural and the realization that this "vacation" was a job for him did not make me envious at all.
My wife and I instead found a bar inhabited by the local service workers and had a great time hearing their stories.
Similar experience yesterday in Coco Rico in Val D'Isere. There seemed to be two types of people: those who were there to have a good time, and those who were there to look good on Instagram or YouTube. (I was in the latter category, obvs.)
I don't think that GP meant that the travelling is fake, but that the house of cards is bound to fall down or is already falling down, because only so many people can make vlogs about making a living making vlogs. For many of them, the end result might simply be having lost their savings/racked up debt, going back home and then considering themselves a failure. And many others dreaming of this lifestyle, feeling that it should be attainable, but not being able to get there themselves.
I was in Thailand for 2017 and there was absolutely a digital nomad marketing ponzi scheme going on as you say. Of the people I met, a completely unsustainable number supposedly made a living "selling the dream" mostly via ebooks and courses. The other 'nomads' were mostly Amazon dropshippers, followed by a few coders/designers.
See also "How I Eat for Free in NYC Using Python, Automation, AI, and Instagram"[0] for an indication as to how "easy" it is to write an algorithmic social media "influencer" with 25K followers.
I thought this was going to be an essential part of this article, but it seems like IEO (Instagram Engine Optimization) is actually technically boring and scammy, whereas automated IEO- while still scammy- is technically interesting!
The use of the term "merit" in this context feels fraught with issue.
One could say that, almost by definition, the individual with the most ability to game the system has the highest merit.
If a poker player is able to read the opponents' faces where no-one else can - they win based on merit. The losers may well disclaim this as being some sort of 'hack'.
We are speaking here about some pictures on a small, rectangular screen held in the hand.
Based off this definition of merit, any system would be meritocratic. A politician winning elections by purchasing votes wouldn't be considered to be merit based.
In poker, reading tells is an accepted part of the game and within the rules. It's my understanding that most of the tactics reported in the article are against Instagram's rules.
My impression is that who’s interested in this sort of service is something like small start up fashion brands that can’t afford an actual celebrity.
My brother makes independent video games, at one point he was approached by someone who offered to broker deal with Twitch streamers to promote one of his games.
How real the popularity of these streamers really was, effects whether this might have been a good idea or not.
Whether that evokes your sympathy or not, I guess the moral of the story, of you’re in the market for purchasing influencer services, buyer beware
The streamers seem to be some of the more honest "influencers" acting as entertainers. At least ones I follow (there are many subgroupings within) will disclose if they have any special connections or contractual obligations (can't show this cutscene or boss fight prerelease), sponsorships, or even if they just received a free copy.
I would advise treating unaffiliated middlemen as scammers like those offering jobs for money. (If there is some affiliated group of streamers and they handle communications that is fine.)
If you want cheap marketing releasing some free copies generate no to marginal expenses.
It is respectful to all involved - you are giving away a few potential sales in exchange for a potential larger market, they can give it a fair shake and let people know what they think.
The viral effect can be real but it seems to depend on its own merits even if the "merit" is a gimmick like being hillariously glitchy.
I stopped reading when the author complained about being able to "buy reposts and shout outs from feature accounts and influencers." Isn't that exactly what being an influencer means: people paying for shoutouts? So it's ok when you're getting paid, but it's fraud when you're paying someone else for the shoutout?
Which is also what I'm hearing from the article. "I've done it, but now I've stopped doing it, and everybody who still does it is bad and cheating". Sounds like "yeah, market manipulation is terrible and evil, and now that I've made my millions from doing it, we should all stop" to me.
> This is how it works: someone working at facebook is taking bribes in exchange for the blue mark, a middle man will take your money (anywhere between $1000 and $15000 dollars, depending on your stupidity) and the friend at fb will submit an application for you to be verified. Hopefully it will be approved.
"someone working at facebook" probably isn't an employee, most likely anything requiring case by case human discretion is a contractor position that pays shit.
On the other hand, this seems like a way to legitimately take your instagram career to the next level! Networking is about who you know, not about how many people you know. Knowing a Facebook verification contractor is some pretty ironclad social proof.
Yeah, I was thinking the same: most human-scalable data entry ops, like application review, is farmed out to contractors.
That said, there's no guarantee that the contractor will be assigned your application to review. Assuming there are bribes, it likely would involve multiple people which increases it's chances of being revealed and less likely to actually be happening.
It's pretty common for bribes to be pretty cheap compared to the gain. Same in DC. The ROI for lobbying is enormous. Spend a few million to get billions in subsidies or tax cuts.
Exactly and the simple reason why, which keeps these basic economics of bribery working so robustly, is the asymmetric measures of value/cost inherent to the two sides of the equation. A government or facebook employee or whomever who has access to some lever worth a great deal will sell access to it for these fairly small sums exactly because the much greater value isn't actually a cost to them. They're leveraging their access to someone elses resources for personal acquisition of a much smaller but to them worthwhile gain. You'd never convince a billionaire to sell you access to something of theirs worth billions by paying them only millions, but, like you said, you can easily convince a senator to give you access to billions in government resources (tax money) for a few million to their personal campaign.
If your expenses equal or exceed your income, even at Facebook salary, an extra $3,000 can be crucial to keeping up the appearance of financial success.
It's a 100% true, I've seen some youtubers talk about all the nitty-gritty of the Instagram world and this was mentioned.
I wonder if it's just an employee filling in a form with their name on it or just some Dev flipping a bool on the backend though. If the former, it does sound risky if Facebook ever gets tired of the corruption and starts investigating.
Just today, I saw a a bunch of comments on an Insta page about selling blue ticks. I reported all of them as scam.
Would be interesting to see, if Instagram responds with the de-facto "Doesn't violate community guidelines".
Of course they will. I’ve flagged actually illegal content on Facebook and got that kind of response. I mean, there are card fraud groups operating on there right now and nasty teenagers flipping stolen bikes on Instagram Live so why am I even surprised?
The OP is suggesting that some "influencers" who get paid to say/show they like something on instagram are "fake" because... they mislead the people who pay them about how many 'followers' they have?
But other people are more "authentically" doing paid product placement, still without necessarily disclosing that to those they "influence"?
I am unimpressed.
It sounds like they're saying that only some people truly have earned the right to get rich scamming the rubes.
Ah, the old “poseurs” trope. It’s all fake and all about superficial selling of an image. I’m not sure if a new poser is any worse than a legacy influencer.
I think it’s about them misleading the advertisers; which is actually fraud. I know a guy who bought 50k followers for a few hundred bucks and uses it to get free shit when he travels. I seriously doubt he’s the only one doing this.
Are you though? It's your job to find the right "influencer" and make sure that they can deliver what you're after. If you're unsure about the realness of their followers, just put some form of tracking into the contract. For every 100 clicks on the link, they get whatever money.
If all you look at are follower counts and then throw your money at them, you're just bad at your job.
As a nine-year old, I watched commercials on our black and white TV showing famous baseball players claiming they "smoked Camels." I knew then that smoking was dangerous, and that it was unlikely that the players "smoked Camels," either. So I don't get this influencer crap. I mean I really do not get it.
I don't think the intentional is to get people to smoke who otherwise wouldn't. It's to get the people who are going to buy cigarettes, and in doing so, chose their brand. When confronted with many choices of competing products, having someone you trust and admire favour a particular product may be enough to tip the scales and get you to take that option.
I find myself doing this often, due to all the podcast ads I hear! If I'm going to buy a mattress or printed framed picture I'm going to start with I've heard about from some "influencer" I follow.
I guess because we "follow" people who interest us or are like minded. I don't set out to "follow an influencer", but when I subscribe to a podcast, or follow someone on twitter because I find their comedy hilarious; that's what I'm doing.
And yet you still remember Camel cigarettes, despite the fact that their ads haven't been aired in half a century.
Most advertising isn't designed to force you to buy, that's not how people behave. Ads are about establishing name recognition first, then nudging you one small step at a time towards a purchase.
along with female ig influencers shilling brands/creating their own (i can count a couple girls i know making bikini brands), so many ig influencers push juuls/vape pens
Sounds like it can take a lot of money and effort to become a winner at the game of Instagram. The system has rules; you have to know them and play them in order to win. Other players know the rules too, and you know that they know that, so fun second order effects exist. I can see why it could be fun, competing with other players. Trying to keep up with whatever kind of picture (and legend behind it, I expect) scores highly, but presumably knowing that the only way to break ahead of the pack would be to take a risk on something a little bit different and win with it. Gambles and game theory and so on.
Instagram isn't something that "matters", though. Is it? Does it matter how this game is played and how the winners are picked? Surely the only ethical issue is people playing who don't realise what the rules are; people who think they're playing a different game based on this "organic" growth the article discusses, so is the answer just to make sure that everyone who plays knows that's not the game anymore? The game has changed; we might as well get angry that Starcraft bouts today bear little resemblance to the slow fumblings that were seen during the first weekend on Battle.Net after Starcraft's release in 1998.
Do the players need to pretend that the game is still the organic game? Maybe that's part of it; there's an audience of judges who aren't playing but give points for "authenticity", I expect. But ultimately, this is a meaningless game some people like to play; the only harm (apart from people getting so into playing the game that they take it too seriously and damage their lives, but that's true of every game) I can see comes when people think they're playing a different game, but we just need to make the game clear up front.
I am way out of touch. The last online game I played with any dedication was probably Counterstrike, back when it was an 8MB alpha mod for HL (I think I've still got that executable on a CD somewhere, if it hasn't flaked with time). I never did Myspace or Facebook or any of the others, but Instagram just seems like a sharper distillation of the games that they became.
It does matter, because "winning" at IG means you have an audience. Audiences can and will be monetized. I don't think this is that hard to see.
The reason so many people go so hard on the Instagram game isn't just to make themselves feel good or validated, it's because when you have 400,000 people watching your stories every day a lot of people will pay you to wear their gear while you do it.
Oh sure, ok, money. I didn't really think of that; it's all well out of my context. It's like sports. It matters like sports matter; for most people just a bit of fun, and for people really good at it, some money. It matters on an individual level for people who like it or make a living at it.
> Instagram isn't something that "matters", though. Is it?
I think that depends on what you count as important. It's pretty safe to assume that this sort of thing happens in every social media where people can monetize. Social media requires a certain amount of social trust to thrive, so if the health of social media generally is important to to you, this matters even if you don't use Instagram specifically.
Personally, this sort of thing is one of the (but certainly not the biggest) reasons why I avoid all social media like the plague.
I checked out a few "influencers" out of curiosity when I first heard the term. It's far worse than Cokie and Cramer. I mean, at least they are mildly interesting to watch or listen to. The new sort seemed invariably dull and vacuous to me. Unwatchable, unlistenable, unreadable, like Season 4 of 'Do you poop enough' on channel 138. I'm not even that picky. I figured it must be mostly fake.
I think you could look at the value of an influencer as providing an aesthetic, much like an artist, but the kicker is that the influencer is driving ads and is part of a consumerist architecture. While true art is nourishing, influencing is about depriving someone of contentment by making them want something they don't have.
I also think when we see people who are paid a lot, we want to like them, and feel as though they are contributing proportional to their pay. We want to know that they're working hard, and making a difference on society, not just for themselves, in a positive way.
The influencer culture is weird, and I would feel weird making so much money essentially being an ad-person.
It's also the same with open source work. You need social connections to big influencers or successful startups in order for your project to get popular. The main channel seems to be Twitter; that's where open source projects tend to be shared and a lot.
I barely use my Twitter account so I was very lucky that one of my projects became popular (over 5K stars on GitHub now). It's a general purpose back end framework.
The only hype that my project got was that it appeared on the front page of HN a couple. of times at the beginning (this was a few years ago).
Because my project grew organically (and mosly linearly) without much social hype, most users tend to be small independent developers who use it for side projects. Also it's now being used by 2 of the top 100 cryptocurrencies (by market cap). Cryptocurrencies tend to generate their own network effects.
No you don't lol. I created a brand new reddit account and posted my OSS project on /r/linux and it was on the top for a while with almost 2k votes. I didn't spend any time marketing or finding influences I just dumped a link and it was shared all over the place because people thought it was cool.
Same happened to my project. I posted it on Reddit, someone saw it and posted it on HN then it made it to the front page. It got almost 1k stars in the first 3 days. That was very unusual. It was pure luck. Just like with your project. You think it's normal because it happened to you but it's not. For the vast majority of popular open source project, they got popular because of social connections.
Why do we call them influencers? Why not rat catchers or pied pipers or something. Because it feels like this story is going to end, the same way the one in Hamelin did.
I agree with your point but the pied piper actually initially solved the problem, was cheated and then came back to take revenge by abducting/drowning the children. So the parallel doesn't really hold.
All these products have a beginning, a middle and an end.
As more and more people clamber on board the whole thing becomes top heavy and collapses under its own weight. Hard to imagine how invasive and fake future mass platforms will be like though...
The house always wins despite running a 'free' platform for people to load their content into...
What I kind of like about it is that those fake influencers burn money of advertisers without producing results by forcing ads on real people. At least in the short run this means less ads for the people which is a really good thing so I support it.
I mean... weren't influencers always fake? It is in their name - they exists to influence people towards some specific outcome. For some - it is equivalent to ads, for others it is political agenda.
Some might even believe in what the say and do, but first and foremost they are platform to deliver an idea. There is nothing real required from them, just an illusion of it.
I was just skimming, but did anyone else get the impression this guy was actually trying to teach people how to cheat, with the complaining tone just for deniability?
The social media platforms benefit out of this situation.
What surprises me is how similar the recommendations are when I borrow someone else's computer in a different geographical location to do some testing or want to use YouTube to look up how to do something. In these scenarios I am on a different operating system, differently gendered to normal, possibly in a borrowed account or in incognito mode. Yet I get the same lowest common denominator stuff that I get at home, logged in and with a particular history. I come away wondering how tailored those recommendations actually are.
Of course they are not that tailored at all. Unless I specifically look for something whatever get recommended is going to be from a quite narrow selection. If I start out looking for a particular topic then the recommended stuff will steer me back to the same froth that everyone else gets.
If I was a paranoid person I would assume that the social media giants were especially good at tracking me. But no, I have been tricked into believing recommendations are more tailored than they actually are.
So why does this suit the social media companies? Well Google/Youtube is probably the case in point. Shifting those videos around costs bandwidth. They have had boxes in the telcos before now, they might as well be a virtual update to Blockbusters and only have the general small selection and not every single option, that will do for most people most of the time. Or like libraries in the olden days where you could put in a special order for any book to borrow but the local library just had a few hundred kiddies books, a few hundred books in big print for the old folks and a few reference works.
There was a story on here today about how Google search results are skimping on showing us everything. I actually had not been able to find a former co-worker recently, and, thanks to the article comments I went on DDG and was able to find him.
So we have a subset of information going on, the same influencers, the same search results, the same videos, this also becomes a corpus of information we rely on and, the more we rely on it, anything outside of the expected becomes alien and rejected by us. It is like eating the same food every day, variety that was once the spice of life doesn't sit well.
Special knowledge is always special knowledge though. The really good stuff has few if any likes/views/reads. It is there for people who take the path required to get there. It matters not what the medium is.
What's interesting is that Facebook could easily clamp down on this: they certainly have the tools to monitor their network for "fake" accounts and identify activity by pools.
Why wouldn't they? Are they counting this manufactured engagement in the figures they use to sell advertisements?
It is much easier to measure amount of scam than detect. That means that company can report "cleaned up numbers" (at least with error bars) but not able distinguish all bad stuff from good stuff.
The meritocracy was always a sham. The "natural aristocracy of talent" is just an attempt to gaslight those cut out of the opportunities so that they will acquiesce to their exploitation.
It depends on how one defines merit and natrual. Meritocracy technically only needs ability to determine - with no regard to fairness, potential, or optimality in how the ability is obtained.
It is immaterial if the interutero cannibal shark that wins because it developed first and the consummed would have been stronger it is still the sole survivor.
Actual aristocrats were better at fighting as they could afford the diet, equipment, and to train from birth essentially. They had advantages but martial abilities still ultimately provided the limit. No money or royal blood could save chevaliers from changes like establishment of pike formations, or armor piercing crossbows on the battlefield, let alone guns no matter how much they cried foul about honor.
Ultimately they were part of a high value specialist-low value generalist cycle like how professional weavers did better than just any peasant in a cottage but worse than factories designed by more educated engineers but staffed with unskilled factory workers who in turn may be displaced by increased automation or cheaper labor elsewhere.
So their surviving descendants "administratized" and had others do the fighting more while they ruled through other means.
til that con-man means confidence man as in the past people where foolish enough to trust people confident to be their friends and then asked for their watches (surprisingly they trusted) and thus stealing them.
The role of easy travel (Mississippi steamboat in Melville's tale), or communications (mail, newspapers, telegraph, telephone, Intenet, ...), is also notable.
The Greek god Hermes (Mercury) represented travel, messengers, and tricksters. I find this interesting.
Influence works. If it didn't, nobody would practice it.
Some forms of influence are clearly illegal. But there are vast gray areas, like pharma sales, where doctors are offered speaking fees to "speak" to an empty room near a nice beach. I would throw both the doctor and the pill pusher into a dark hole and throw away the key and that would save our society tens, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars and many lives.
But the first step in all these cases is to admit that influence works. Stop putting the onus on the consumer, least of all when the whole "market" leading up to the consumer is also compromised by influence. Stop claiming that influence is "free speech." It isn't. It's the corruption of free speech. Stop claiming that laws against influence are unenforceable. If influence could not be identified, it could not be remunerated.
While it's often a good idea to imagine a world with fewer laws and rules, or systems that are self-correcting, the other approach needs consideration, too. Influence could be regulated, taxed, and circumscribed more tightly, with more kinds of influence prohibited by law.
Bad influencing won't go away if you ignore it. That's just poisonous smugness. Influence isn't "just how things are." There's lots of influence that is already illegal. Choose to do something, or, unless you are a hermit, things will get worse.
The funny thing is advertising is an area where it is hard to determine /why/ something was successful. Is it the ad campaign or because the new flavor is that good?
If you could give perfect attribution of influence on outcomes you should probably be a world changing billionaire already.
Anything which affects speech affects free speech "corruption" had nothing to do with it. The goal of speech is to spread a message which is a form of influence!
Defamation laws can still affect free speech and can and have been abused to stifle truth and criticism. It is dangerously naive to think that one can just restrict "influencing" and not cause harm. Point out the mayor id taking bribes? Jail for trying to influence elections and operation of the state.
Even most radically you could stop renumiation sure but that doesn't mean influence would be stopped and would only give rise to networks of "not paid for influencing" influencers.
It's hard to catch money laundering. It is very likely that a lot of money laundering goes on undeterred by law. But still it's illegal. The way it is detected is by demanding that the banks themselves alert authorities to possible money laundering.
Similarly because social media platforms have the analytics to detect advertising masquerading as influencers, this type of unregulated advertising could be brought under regulation by requiring social media platforms to report it.
No. I follow a lot of blogs and feel the same way about most of them as I do about HN. I do not feel that way about truly high-quality blogs. By the way, RSS is the best thing ever.
I also use IRC whenever I have some question or need help with something and it's great. I never feel my time spent on IRC is a waste, but my usage of it is quite focused and I don't hang out in rooms compulsively like I do on HN.
Maybe I'm super dumb but how much value could an online avatar possibly have if the mere prevalence of spam causes one's "followers" to lose their focus and meander away?
This Instagram influencers thing is really a separate universe of cheats and tricks. Take those wannabe influencers, who are "promoting" some exclusive brand for free without brand owner knowledge only to make an impression that this brand paid them, which means that they are such influential influencers. Apparently they hope that some other brand owner will look and say "Wow, this guy was hired by, say, Nike, for a promo, we had to hire her or him as well too". Crazy times.
Good article. I like that it's been written in the frantic style of someone who's just discovered the dark patterns inherent in the Internet sharecropping industry. Hopefully some of the aspiring Youtuber/IG people read this and understand that the market for influencers is way past the saturation point.
They own the beach, and you are a single grain of sand screaming for attention among all the other grains of sand.
Uh, did you intend to misspell that, just to drive home the point? Or did you actually make a grammatical mistake, while calling out another poster's grammatical mistake, who was him- or her- self calling out yet a third person's grammatical mistakes?
Back in ancient times, scammers placed small ads in the back of comic books and computer ad catalogs and gardening magazines and the like. I remember one case where a guy placed an ad that said, "Send $1 to [his P.O. box]" and made some money over the course of a few months before anyone complained. He didn't promise to send anything for the dollar, so iirc he wasn't prosecuted.
I loved seeing those ads in vintage Archie comics ('60s-'80s editions). Those ads wouldn't bother including a photo, but usually had a nicely drawn artist's rendering. That to me spelled a certain kind of commitment to the scam. Today, all they'd have to do is select the right demographic on FB ads (usually people who "also express interest in" IQ pills or some other snake oil), and click a button to put the text-only ad live.
Maybe add a bad Photoshop image if you're feeling creative.
On the other hand, the Internet makes so many people aware of scams so there is less chance of any particular target falling for it. Of course, some people get so over sensitized to scams that they filter out all legitimate items to thinking it may be a scam.
Scammers also don't need to fool all people some of the time - just some people all of the time. Nigerian Prince Scamming already filters for maximizing gullibility to reduce time wasteage.
Can't imagine this is going to be my most popular comment but... the first thing I did was Google for one of the services she's complaining about and give them $35 for one of the things she's complaining about. If it works, I'll pump more money into it.
I've spent about $1,200 so far building an Instagram following -- albeit it's quite small. I'm shooting for 5,000 real, engaged followers, and willing to spend $5,000 getting it. I think it will be an asset that will easily throw off more than $5,000 of value for me. We'll see!
At first, you have the early adopters. Things grow organically and it doesn't feel like a zero-sum game because there aren't many players.
Next comes the growth phase, where more people get involved, and start competing for attention/clicks/votes/whatever points system.
Next comes the exploiters, who discover weaknesses in the system and take advantage of them. They tend to make a lot of money because there's not much competition in this niche.
Next comes the crossover, where the exploit knowledge becomes public, and everyone now must do it because everyone else is.
Next comes the shutout, where the company running things starts actively punishing bad actors, but by this time, being a bad actor is essential to survival, so people do it anyway. It becomes a game of cat-and-mouse, new exploits, new mitigations.
Eventually, the company manages to fix their algorithms enough that the exploits don't offer decent marginal returns anymore, and it returns to what the company originally intended: 1% of people are successful, 99% of people make next to nothing, and the company makes shitloads.
And then the new big thing comes out. The old system goes into decline and the new system starts to take over. Rinse and repeat.