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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

#161

Post by Nextgrid »

helloindia wrote: post #124
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".

Of course they will. I’ve flagged actually illegal content on Facebook and got that kind of response. I mean, there are card fraud groups operating on there right now and nasty teenagers flipping stolen bikes on Instagram Live so why am I even surprised?

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

#162

Post by ukoki »

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…

I was in Thailand for 2017 and there was absolutely a digital nomad marketing ponzi scheme going on as you say. Of the people I met, a completely unsustainable number supposedly made a living "selling the dream" mostly via ebooks and courses. The other 'nomads' were mostly Amazon dropshippers, followed by a few coders/designers.

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

#163

Post by piokoch »

This Instagram influencers thing is really a separate universe of cheats and tricks. Take those wannabe influencers, who are "promoting" some exclusive brand for free without brand owner knowledge only to make an impression that this brand paid them, which means that they are such influential influencers. Apparently they hope that some other brand owner will look and say "Wow, this guy was hired by, say, Nike, for a promo, we had to hire her or him as well too". Crazy times.

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

#164

Post by raxxorrax »

kristianc wrote: post #152
raxxorrax wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends if the ad is just presenting something or the marketeer engages in further "perception management" (I don't know the jargon). This stuff, buying clicks, lobbying platforms to ban content you don't want to be associated with your product/service because it could distort its "cleanness". Advertising is needed but there are a lot of valid reasons people don't like them very much.

The parent made a pretty blanket statement that marketing is wrong. There are bad marketers as there are bad programmers, bad lawyers and bad physicians, but we don't jump to 'all programming is bad'.

Didn't say that all marketing or even the majority is wrong. Just that there are bad practices.

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

#165

Post by HNLurker2 »

meruru wrote: post #112
HNLurker2 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't tell if sunk cost fallacy or honest. Do you use IG/other social media?

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.

So Instagram is inherently worthless?

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

#166

Post by pmlnr »

mekoka wrote: post #158
kstenerud wrote: post #120

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 l…

You're describing society. Any free "social" system, virtual or otherwise, can and will attract the same ingredients and the outcome will be a strong approximation of a normal society.

> normal society

Maybe society needs to change.

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

#167

Post by jondubois »

baroffoos wrote: post #142
jondubois wrote: post #128

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.…

No you don't lol. I created a brand new reddit account and posted my OSS project on /r/linux and it was on the top for a while with almost 2k votes. I didn't spend any time marketing or finding influences I just dumped a link and it was shared all over the place because people thought it was cool.

Same happened to my project. I posted it on Reddit, someone saw it and posted it on HN then it made it to the front page. It got almost 1k stars in the first 3 days. That was very unusual. It was pure luck. Just like with your project. You think it's normal because it happened to you but it's not. For the vast majority of popular open source project, they got popular because of social connections.

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

#168

Post by bartread »

cjslep wrote: post #154
fphilipe wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

I was in Zermatt 2 weekends ago walking around the town when I suddenly heard behind me "Hello and welcome to my channel". Turn around, see a posse of people around a guy pointing a serious camera at his face. I immediately felt bad for him, it felt so unnatural and the realization that this "vacation" was a job for him did not make me envious at all. My wife and I instead found a bar inhabited by the local service w…

Similar experience yesterday in Coco Rico in Val D'Isere. There seemed to be two types of people: those who were there to have a good time, and those who were there to look good on Instagram or YouTube. (I was in the latter category, obvs.)

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

#169

Post by omginternets »

zanny wrote: post #114
ip26 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thirty years ago nobody knew why they should care about the internet. Fifteen years ago nobody understood why they should get a smartphone. New technology often has to initially answer the question of "Why should I care", even if it's obvious in retrospect. You could wait around for people to figure it out on their own, or you could help them. Just as an illustration, if you watched the show Silicon Valley, this was…

> 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…

Quite, but those aren't the only things being done by companies (or indeed smartphones!)

Cynicism is easy, but the truth is that there are useful, helpful things out there, and that making people aware of this is not intrinsically wrong.

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

#170

Post by omginternets »

raxxorrax wrote: post #150
omginternets wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things: 1. You're putting a lot of very different things in the same bag. Marketing is not advertising, and all advertising is not unethical. 2. I don't know where you work, but I'm willing to bet you're making a living because advertisers are pushing a product or service you build/direct. If you're going to make this kind of blanket statement, you should at least follow its implications all the way to the endpoi…

That depends if the ad is just presenting something or the marketeer engages in further "perception management" (I don't know the jargon). This stuff, buying clicks, lobbying platforms to ban content you don't want to be associated with your product/service because it could distort its "cleanness". Advertising is needed but there are a lot of valid reasons people don't like them very much.

Yes, it very much depends. That's precisely the point.
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