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Instagram influencers: Have we stopped believing?

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Re: Instagram influencers: Have we stopped believing?

#21

Post by dantondwa »

wcunning wrote: post #10
hiven wrote: post #5

There was a shop that said to influencers they could get a discount only after 30 people used their specific influencer promo code. None of them did (or could do) it. It’s highly ineffective and for the most part it’s just some entitled person with an inflated ego demanding freebies. Madness to think businesses can really believe they are of any real substance or significance. Instagram more and more has become a ces…

I hesitate to defend a Facebook property, but here goes anyway... My Instagram feed is 100% welding, machining and a small smattering of woodworking. Literally any project I post gets universally positive feedback, with the occasional constructive suggestion. If I ask for help on a project, I get advice in at most a few hours from someone with 40 years more experience than I have. Contrast this to the forum community…

I agree with you. Instagram is the only social media I still use, and it's mainly because it's so non-toxic. I mostly see stuff related to my hobbies, some comic stripes, some friends I care about. It's by definition a bubble, but it's one that is actually chosen by me. Mainly, its pleasantness comes from the sensation of not being inundated by contents, by the lack of importance that comments have, etc. I bet it's possible to have a different experience, if I followed influencers and whatnot it would be much worst. However, for how I use it, I don't mind it and I actually get to know interesting things.

Re: Instagram influencers: Have we stopped believing?

#22

Post by HNLurker2 »

Reedx wrote: post #18
hiven wrote: post #5

There was a shop that said to influencers they could get a discount only after 30 people used their specific influencer promo code. None of them did (or could do) it. It’s highly ineffective and for the most part it’s just some entitled person with an inflated ego demanding freebies. Madness to think businesses can really believe they are of any real substance or significance. Instagram more and more has become a ces…

Even worse are the kid influencers on YouTube. Kids advertising to other kids. And parents trying to turn their own kids into influencers. The whole thing is just gross.

you mean parents forcefully making their children prodigies in teenis, chess etc. is bad? same goes with youtubers

Re: Instagram influencers: Have we stopped believing?

#23

Post by AJ007 »

wcunning wrote: post #10
hiven wrote: post #5

There was a shop that said to influencers they could get a discount only after 30 people used their specific influencer promo code. None of them did (or could do) it. It’s highly ineffective and for the most part it’s just some entitled person with an inflated ego demanding freebies. Madness to think businesses can really believe they are of any real substance or significance. Instagram more and more has become a ces…

I hesitate to defend a Facebook property, but here goes anyway... My Instagram feed is 100% welding, machining and a small smattering of woodworking. Literally any project I post gets universally positive feedback, with the occasional constructive suggestion. If I ask for help on a project, I get advice in at most a few hours from someone with 40 years more experience than I have. Contrast this to the forum community…

Adjacently related, I follow a lot of artists on Twitter. A recurring complaint, including for myself when I previously used Instagram was non-permissioned and uncredited reposting of artist’s content. As an artist it is a problem for obvious reasons, for a user if I like the work I want to know exactly who did it and why.

Of course this can and does happen on twitter, but I think two thinks make the results more favorable. The first is the poster can get called out on what they did. Secondly, Twitter’s less reliance on algorithmic feeds mean the content theft is less “rewarded.”

The whole Tumblr fiasco upset a lot of artists and pretty much terminated the use of any artists whose work triggered the nudity detection filter, which was easy to do. Twitter gets complaints about compression, especially with videos and pixel art. All of the extra tweets that come with the art has forced me to unfollow a lot of artists whose work I like. Instagram has the issue I just described. All of those billions of dollars invested in consumer content sharing apps and this is the current state of things.

Re: Instagram influencers: Have we stopped believing?

#24

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

wcunning wrote: post #10
hiven wrote: post #5

There was a shop that said to influencers they could get a discount only after 30 people used their specific influencer promo code. None of them did (or could do) it. It’s highly ineffective and for the most part it’s just some entitled person with an inflated ego demanding freebies. Madness to think businesses can really believe they are of any real substance or significance. Instagram more and more has become a ces…

I hesitate to defend a Facebook property, but here goes anyway... My Instagram feed is 100% welding, machining and a small smattering of woodworking. Literally any project I post gets universally positive feedback, with the occasional constructive suggestion. If I ask for help on a project, I get advice in at most a few hours from someone with 40 years more experience than I have. Contrast this to the forum community…

I want to use Instagram as you describe but only if I could remove the like button. Its existence makes it feel like I’m pandering for likes about anything I post so I just uninstall the app. I want to share things with people with nothing expected in return.

Re: Instagram influencers: Have we stopped believing?

#25

Post by cgriswald »

hiven wrote: post #5

There was a shop that said to influencers they could get a discount only after 30 people used their specific influencer promo code. None of them did (or could do) it. It’s highly ineffective and for the most part it’s just some entitled person with an inflated ego demanding freebies. Madness to think businesses can really believe they are of any real substance or significance. Instagram more and more has become a ces…

> There was a shop that said to influencers they could get a discount only after 30 people used their specific influencer promo code. None of them did (or could do) it.

I'm not convinced that's a fair measure. Instagram, YouTube, and maybe a couple of things are some of the few advertisements that actually reach me. I run an adblocker and don't watch TV commercials. The ads are generally about things I like, I find them non-offensive, and I have actually made purchases as a result.

> It’s highly ineffective and for the most part it’s just some entitled person with an inflated ego demanding freebies.

I have an "insta-famous" dog more as a hobby than anything, and businesses often offer us things for free or deeply discounted in exchange for fair review and a post with our dog; we never offer/ask. We also have had (major brand) businesses who wanted us to shoot pictures of our dog with their product for their website for free, with no attribution, and with no discount or free products. So, from my perspective, the businesses aren't exactly being taken advantage of here.

Re: Instagram influencers: Have we stopped believing?

#26

Post by matwood »

hiven wrote: post #5

There was a shop that said to influencers they could get a discount only after 30 people used their specific influencer promo code. None of them did (or could do) it. It’s highly ineffective and for the most part it’s just some entitled person with an inflated ego demanding freebies. Madness to think businesses can really believe they are of any real substance or significance. Instagram more and more has become a ces…

> It’s highly ineffective

Other than a click through and sale, it's hard for any advertising to prove effectiveness. Yet, there are still ads on TV and the radio. For many brands, small influencers are a cheap way (some free product and maybe some money) to keep product in front of people when thought of in aggregate.

Re: Instagram influencers: Have we stopped believing?

#27

Post by andrepd »

wcunning wrote: post #10
hiven wrote: post #5

There was a shop that said to influencers they could get a discount only after 30 people used their specific influencer promo code. None of them did (or could do) it. It’s highly ineffective and for the most part it’s just some entitled person with an inflated ego demanding freebies. Madness to think businesses can really believe they are of any real substance or significance. Instagram more and more has become a ces…

I hesitate to defend a Facebook property, but here goes anyway... My Instagram feed is 100% welding, machining and a small smattering of woodworking. Literally any project I post gets universally positive feedback, with the occasional constructive suggestion. If I ask for help on a project, I get advice in at most a few hours from someone with 40 years more experience than I have. Contrast this to the forum community…

That's good for you. It's great that you found interesting people in Instagram, but that doesn't change the fact that for 95% of users Instagram is as the GP described: a cesspool of shallowness, materialism, false appearances, and a great harm to the mental health of our youth (and not only youth).

Re: Instagram influencers: Have we stopped believing?

#28

Post by leftyted »

It doesn't really matter if the accident was staged or not. Profiting from a real accident is worse than staging a fake one. More broadly, it simply isn't possible to publicly document events like this (even if they're happy events) without cheapening them. This is the fundamental problem with instagram (and other social media) and my sense is that people are becoming increasingly aware of it. By publicizing yourself (and your life), you are lying. The only way to truly reveal yourself to other people is through action (words and deeds).

So I agree with the article that we're in the midst of a backlash against the whole "influencer" thing. As usual with these things, that backlash has already occurred in the weird, unclean corners of the internet and now it's spreading into the mainstream. I don't know where things will end up, but it will be interesting to see.

I suspect that there are healthy ways to use social media but they will require a self-awareness that the first generations of social media users lacked.

Re: Instagram influencers: Have we stopped believing?

#29

Post by matwood »

sverige wrote: post #19

> Influencers also get a harder time than celebrities in terms of their credibility, Ms Tasker says. > "I think there's an unfair sense that influencers have no talent beyond content creation, so we hold them to much higher standards in their work. > "In my experience, celebs are far worse for disclosing brand partnerships and misleading audiences, but aren't held to account by their followers in the same way." I jus…

You're thinking of it from the wrong direction. It's not about talent, but just another advertising channel. Why people follow an influencer can be for all sorts of reasons, but those are not important.

An ad on IG on a popular apparel keyword might be ~$1-$3 per click for a high cost demo (the exact demo who follows influencers). Apparel is notoriously inexpensive to create, so a shoe company could send out free pairs to a bunch of small (10k-20k followers) influencers and likely come out ahead.

This trick of using influencers to bypass the high cost CPC of IG proper is why IG keeps changing the algorithm to bury ad like posts and force either the brands to advertise directly or the influencers to pay to boost their posts.

Re: Instagram influencers: Have we stopped believing?

#30

Post by [deleted] »

wcunning wrote: post #10
hiven wrote: post #5

There was a shop that said to influencers they could get a discount only after 30 people used their specific influencer promo code. None of them did (or could do) it. It’s highly ineffective and for the most part it’s just some entitled person with an inflated ego demanding freebies. Madness to think businesses can really believe they are of any real substance or significance. Instagram more and more has become a ces…

I hesitate to defend a Facebook property, but here goes anyway... My Instagram feed is 100% welding, machining and a small smattering of woodworking. Literally any project I post gets universally positive feedback, with the occasional constructive suggestion. If I ask for help on a project, I get advice in at most a few hours from someone with 40 years more experience than I have. Contrast this to the forum community…

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