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An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy

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Re: An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy

#121

Post by fre3k »

Jedi72 wrote: post #92
CptFribble wrote: post #76

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…

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 influen…

Free will is an illusion.

Re: An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy

#122

Post by fphilipe »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #94

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 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 feel sorry for these people.

Re: An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy

#123

Post by Double_a_92 »

zwaps wrote: post #30

Man, reading this makes me so happy I don't care about social media, and I have other aspirations than trying to be a social media influencer. What a miserable feeling, chasing numbers, producing and contributing nothing real to humanity. I bet it is better for happiness and mental health to stay away from all that.

For the influencer itself that probably feels great. You do actually have some influence over all those people that follow you.

The question is more why so many people decide to follow those shallow meaningless things...

Re: An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy

#124

Post by helloindia »

president wrote: post #9

> 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. This is interesting if true

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".

Re: An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy

#125

Post by mnky9800n »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #95
Jedi72 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 influen…

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.

This is true but it's not cause and effect like OP suggests. If it were then marketing would be a solved problem.

Re: An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy

#126

Post by mic47 »

i_am_proteus wrote: post #19

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.

Re: An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy

#127

Post by flukus »

ip26 wrote: post #98
Jedi72 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 influen…

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.

> Marketing isn't intrinsically evil.

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.

Re: An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy

#128

Post by jondubois »

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.

Re: An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy

#130

Post by [deleted] »

exolymph wrote: post #107
nilskidoo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is ridiculous. There are about a zillion products and brands out there that people didn't know about until they found out through marketing. Also, lol @ commenting on Hacker News to rail against marketing. This is literally a lead-gen site for YC

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