An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by lm28469 » Tue, Apr 09, 2019, 11:17 AM UTC

RikNieu wrote: post #93

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.

> What a miserable feeling, chasing numbers, producing and contributing nothing real to humanity. You just described 80% of financial services...

And 80% of tech startups. If you step back far enough everything is pointless besides having water, a shelter, food and a small community.

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

#172

Post by Zigurd » Tue, Apr 09, 2019, 11:53 AM UTC

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.

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

#173

Post by growlist » Tue, Apr 09, 2019, 12:03 PM UTC

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…

> 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?!

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

#174

Post by JabavuAdams » Tue, Apr 09, 2019, 12:52 PM UTC

atoav wrote: post #139

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 t…

When you have an exploitable information asymmetry, do you exploit others with it, or do you inoculate others to it?

* or do you exploit others with it until you're financially comfortable and morally uncomfortable, at which point you pivot, mea culpa, and educate...

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

#175

Post by JabavuAdams » Tue, Apr 09, 2019, 12:54 PM UTC

blackflame7000 wrote: post #65

BethGagaShaggy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What a miserable feeling, chasing numbers, producing and contributing nothing real to humanity. Yeah. This isn't exclusive to social media influencers, though.

The thing is, the people who do it don't know that's all they are doing. It's meaningful to them. False hope is a terrible thing.

#authentic <- I don't think that means what they think it means.

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

#176

Post by KozmoNau7 » Tue, Apr 09, 2019, 1:07 PM UTC

ivanhoe wrote: post #160

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…

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 rule…

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.

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

#177

Post by Nasrudith » Tue, Apr 09, 2019, 1:08 PM UTC

ivanhoe wrote: post #160

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…

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 rule…

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.

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

#178

Post by Nasrudith » Tue, Apr 09, 2019, 1:21 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #138

flukus wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 shou…

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…

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.

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

#179

Post by Nasrudith » Tue, Apr 09, 2019, 1:27 PM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #88

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…

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? No such thing as a brand shown by accident.

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".

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

#180

Post by Zenbit_UX » Tue, Apr 09, 2019, 1:39 PM UTC

joe_hoyle wrote: post #67

esotericn wrote: post #47

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, rectangu…

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.

Somethings are part of the rules by virtue of the alternative being uninforceable.