An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy

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.

> or you could help them.

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".

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.

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 not surprisingly, adroit and modern Mac always got the best of outdated and inflexible PC ...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.

(1) - https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Marketing-14th-Philip-Kotl...

This is basically a repeat of SEO.

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.