Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’ • Hacker News Board

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#131

Post by vmception » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

namanyayg wrote: post #103

vmception wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead, he suggested that we all wait and purchase the book on the same day from Amazon. The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that day. In my instagram marketing last decade thats what we did. While others were imagining that people "buy likes", or actually were dealing with bots, we were doing this for our clients. Basically you get meme accounts to do a promotion of a profile that is currently…

What content category are these accounts posting in?

Travel & Lifestyle

Models / Scantily clad women

Celebrity Fanpages

Funny, Memes (quotes overlaying images)

Motivation (derivative of travel & lifestyle but with quotes overlaying the images)

Fitness (derivative of motivation)

Oh yeah, I run my own fanpages for my own pages. lol. Thats another technique. Fanpages are just downgraded main pages when another account grows up or is acquired in the similar category (and rebranded back to my brand, with the lesser account being rebranded - often as a fanpage - sometimes as a business providing non-social media goods and services).

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#132

Post by vmception » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

throa2213 wrote: post #112

vmception wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead, he suggested that we all wait and purchase the book on the same day from Amazon. The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that day. In my instagram marketing last decade thats what we did. While others were imagining that people "buy likes", or actually were dealing with bots, we were doing this for our clients. Basically you get meme accounts to do a promotion of a profile that is currently…

Thanks for the information! Could you share how much does it cost to create "one of the popular quickly and cheaply grown accounts to slide into the DMs of local women"? E.g., let's say I wanna create another meme account with 5k followers, how much shall I pay for other meme accounts for a promotion on average? And I was always thinking that the engagement ratio is low for meme accounts, any information about it?

Buy the account and rebrand to similar content. Don't grow the account from scratch, let teenagers in eastern europe and malaysia do that. Try not to get scammed when buying the account.

Anything you do from then on is to offset the decline in followers.

De-risk and break even on doing promos for other people. (lets say you bought a $5k account for $50, do 5-10 promos for other people, done. Start with more capital and get a more compelling account, don't go too big though, 30k is a sweet spot.)

Engagement ratio of 1% is bad, 2% is ok, 3% is great. Not super important when talking with individuals. Only when trying to charge more for a promo, or selling the account.

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#133

Post by chrismorgan » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

chadcmulligan wrote: post #122

chrismorgan wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patents are an extremely poor signal of required innovation; I strongly suspect they’re worse than random. Most innovation is retained as trade secret rather than patented. Patents are more an indicator that you’re a big business, or that you are operating in a domain where hostile use of patents is rife (and video is one such area). I just did a very quick skim through those patents (just reading what’s on that page…

Funny, patents were originally intended to stop people keeping trade secrets, now so many patents are just nonsense, all the important stuff is kept secret again.

Network software has made it possible to keep trade secrets perfectly. When you deployed something physical, people could analyse it in detail, trying to figure out what the ingredients to your drink were, pulling apart your widget and measuring it very precisely, that kind of thing. Some would be easy, some would be hard, but it was all at least physically theoretically possible. So the patent system said “save us the trouble of figuring it out, and we’ll grant you a monopoly on this particular approach for a while”.

But with network software, the interesting part is out of reach, so you can’t reverse-engineer it.

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#134

Post by throa2213 » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

vmception wrote: post #132

throa2213 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the information! Could you share how much does it cost to create "one of the popular quickly and cheaply grown accounts to slide into the DMs of local women"? E.g., let's say I wanna create another meme account with 5k followers, how much shall I pay for other meme accounts for a promotion on average? And I was always thinking that the engagement ratio is low for meme accounts, any information about it?

Buy the account and rebrand to similar content. Don't grow the account from scratch, let teenagers in eastern europe and malaysia do that. Try not to get scammed when buying the account. Anything you do from then on is to offset the decline in followers. De-risk and break even on doing promos for other people. (lets say you bought a $5k account for $50, do 5-10 promos for other people, done. Start with more capital a…

Thank you so much! You seem to be a person who actually knows what they're talking about.

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#135

Post by vmception » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 6:18 PM UTC

lowtolerance wrote: post #116

vmception wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on how you would acknowledge that valid reality? Is there a different wording you would use if it was indeed common and accurate outcome? From my perspective there is no contempt, only circumvention and the reason why.

It’s not a “valid reality”, it’s the anecdotal experience of someone who uses dating apps to collect attractive women. In general , this is not how women behave on dating apps. This is how models who are obviously self-promoting through dating apps behave; it’s only your general experience because this is clearly what you are drawn to.

its "anybody that puts their instagram profile in their dating app bio" not "models self-promoting that represent any meaningful amount of what I'm drawn to"

people passively grow their instagrams and don't have any interest in checking their messages

the behavior I actually navigate is completely outside of the dating apps

I see the billboard (on the dating app) and found a way to get to the top of their inbox for quality time (outside of the dating app). Never even attempting to "match with them" on the dating app. The other side of the control group is an experience of what happens when a normal bloke tries messaging them on instagram: absolutely nothing

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#136

Post by anon9001 » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 7:24 PM UTC

vmception wrote: post #129

anon9001 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of quick questions if you don't mind, since I don't use ig but I'm trying to understand your post: > Basically you get meme accounts to do a promotion of a profile that is currently private Is this as crude as looking for large accounts on socialblade and sending them DMs? Or is there some kind of marketplace? Are there popular forums or something I should know about? What kind of pricing are you looking for…

Think of it as an economy. The venues for communication are definitely all of the above, but there are also group chats in instagram where meme and large accounts hang out and like each other's post and reshare each other's content. So for getting started there are cold DMs, there are forums, there ARE marketplaces mostly for the buying and selling of accounts, and there are also DMs. The otherside of this economy is…

Fascinating stuff. If you wrote a series of blog posts detailing how you manipulate the world of instagram, you'd probably frontpage HN.

Last question: If I wanted to throw a few bucks at it and play in the sandbox, do you think there's any actual legal concerns? Do you use a burner phone number and proxy for dealing with your accounts, or is this all so normalized now that it's fine to tie your real identity to meme accounts? (from ig's point of view, not publicly, of course)

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#137

Post by lowtolerance » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 7:52 PM UTC

goldenkey wrote: post #128

lowtolerance wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a “valid reality”, it’s the anecdotal experience of someone who uses dating apps to collect attractive women. In general , this is not how women behave on dating apps. This is how models who are obviously self-promoting through dating apps behave; it’s only your general experience because this is clearly what you are drawn to.

This isn't the least bit true. Tinder and the like are filled with spamming "influencers" that are pretty much only using the platforms to funnel simps to their IG and other social accounts, in order to gain more followers. Modern day spam, essentially.

I don’t doubt that they exist, I’m saying that in no way do those accounts outweigh legitimate, non-spam accounts that stick out like a sore thing to anyone with a shred of common sense.

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#138

Post by vmception » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 8:15 PM UTC

anon9001 wrote: post #136

vmception wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it as an economy. The venues for communication are definitely all of the above, but there are also group chats in instagram where meme and large accounts hang out and like each other's post and reshare each other's content. So for getting started there are cold DMs, there are forums, there ARE marketplaces mostly for the buying and selling of accounts, and there are also DMs. The otherside of this economy is…

Fascinating stuff. If you wrote a series of blog posts detailing how you manipulate the world of instagram, you'd probably frontpage HN. Last question: If I wanted to throw a few bucks at it and play in the sandbox, do you think there's any actual legal concerns? Do you use a burner phone number and proxy for dealing with your accounts, or is this all so normalized now that it's fine to tie your real identity to meme…

Yeah only reason you want a burner phone is because Facebook is obsessed with SMS 2-factor because they care more about aggregating user data than security. Do they allow OTP systems yet? People that know your phone number will try to steal your popular account with SS7 attacks if they find a way to put two and two together. I think you can still sign up with email.

OH you mean to use the instagram app. Yeah thats not a problem. Just create the account however you do it and login on your normal device.

No proxy necessary.

No legal concerns with the state. With private persons you are dealing with a lot of creatives and media people, so although reposting is a fun thing, if you ever brand a page to actually look like an actual business then people will threaten to sue you for copyright infringement for random unilateral reposting. Just asking is ok, but not a standard that anyone else has to think about.

Facebook slowly lets Instagram facilitate its economy as you can have as many instagram accounts as you want logged in at the same time, and it is easy to switch between them. They should really be brokering the promotion and account trading transactions too, maybe its not as big as I imagine? But it could be much bigger too if they added confidence to the market.

So IG won't care. If you mess up with objectionable content, only that one account will get sanctioned in isolation. Although it is still possible to get an IMEI banned.

> Fascinating stuff. If you wrote a series of blog posts detailing how you manipulate the world of instagram, you'd probably frontpage HN.

I'm working on more lucrative things right now, so I'm just answering questions because the comments have gone this direction!

I knew this edge would diminish if I ever wrote about it, and on HN specifically I just figured a bunch of Gen-X people would really miss the point and only see objectionable unrelatable social media stuff they don't want to think about, a "get of my lawn" attitude, with the idea of a social media economy they can't perceive being something they would just argue the semantics of. So I had imagined it was only downside.

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#139

Post by obiye » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 8:16 PM UTC

vmception wrote: post #127

obiye wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s all the same stuff. I’ll never understand the appeal.

The appeal is to remove the randomness from society and specifically regarding attraction and consensual intimate outcomes. I didn't like having an average case success with average people an average amount of times. I was and still am very allured by having best case success with consensus attractive people an above average amount of times. Consensus attractive and whatever I specifically find to be extremes of attr…

Yeah, I find sales and marketing to be distasteful in general, and casting human relationships into that mold turns something beautiful about life into a hollow commodity. I have strong desires for community, and personal meaning, so I am happy to have deeper relationships even if it means they are fewer in number. It also feels to me that the urge to pursue a large volume of experiences in this gamified way is an attempt at finding validation without being vulnerable, which is ultimately self-defeating. But hey, if it makes you happy then who am I to say anything. But that perspective is why I don’t understand the appeal.

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#140

Post by vmception » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 8:45 PM UTC

obiye wrote: post #139

vmception wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The appeal is to remove the randomness from society and specifically regarding attraction and consensual intimate outcomes. I didn't like having an average case success with average people an average amount of times. I was and still am very allured by having best case success with consensus attractive people an above average amount of times. Consensus attractive and whatever I specifically find to be extremes of attr…

Yeah, I find sales and marketing to be distasteful in general, and casting human relationships into that mold turns something beautiful about life into a hollow commodity. I have strong desires for community, and personal meaning, so I am happy to have deeper relationships even if it means they are fewer in number. It also feels to me that the urge to pursue a large volume of experiences in this gamified way is an at…

It was an analogy about how benign it is and not exclusive to cisgender courtship. Things that make me attractive in one environment make me attractive in another environment as well, compared to putting on a hallow mask temporarily for women. Oddly enough, I don't mind their makeup.

> It also feels to me that the urge to pursue a large volume of experiences in this gamified way is an attempt at finding validation without being vulnerable

Or its exclusively an attempt to have sex with a variety of people that look like the people I always wanted to have sex with, and it is as fulfilling, entertaining and intriguing as I expected it to be? I was wondering if you considered that.