This guy was really keen to remind us over and over that he is a professor.
The Anxiety of Influencers
181–190 of 192 posts
Re: The Anxiety of Influencers
#182This guy was really keen to remind us over and over that he is a professor.
It seemed natural stream of consciousness to me - he's in a play-school setting with people within a few years of the age of his students
Re: The Anxiety of Influencers
#183Man. When I was 18 I was overweight and already balding. I worked at a gas station. Once a hooker spit on me because I wouldn’t let her steal some ice cream. I cut my foot once on broken glass in the dumpster because part of my job was tamping it down with my feet (it cut through my shoe). Would I have traded it to be an influencer if I could have? Shit yeah in a heartbeat. But unfortunately for me no one wanted to w…
36 is an old man? Are you being facetious?
Season-four Homer Simpson was 36.
Re: The Anxiety of Influencers
#184I think a lot about society and culture -- especially now that we have a young child. I think a lot of the "ills" are just different manifestations of bad parenting.
It's a values thing -- I learned from my parents and grandparents to think futuristically, to get value by creating value, to be suspicious of the free lunch, to not orient my sense of self too much around what others around me are thinking and doing.
This set of thinking prevents me from being interested in being an influencer, which is the same thing that kept me from being sucked into the dot-com boom and bust, from getting excited about crypto, from being sucked into the ebbs and flows of caring about what twitter cares about, etc.
There's a sort of steadiness that comes from your parenting and your values. And in the lack of that, you fall for one thing or another. If it wasn't "influencing," it'd be something else.
Re: The Anxiety of Influencers
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All fried chicken tastes basically the same How many places have you had fried chicken in?
All mass market fried chicken tastes pretty similar.
That's not an improvement on the original claim at all. How many places have you had mass market fried chicken in?
Just sticking to a single brand, KFC in China uses a lot of red pepper. KFC in the US doesn't.
Re: The Anxiety of Influencers
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness. The difficulty is that it can mean either it's true and the authorities don't want you to know it, or it's false and they don't want you to believe it. Judging information either way based only on it being censored leads to error of two different types. Neither is correct thinking but plenty of…
> but plenty of people make the opposite mistake of trusting authorities In almost 40 years, my heuristic of trusting the government and ignoring anything being sold to me as “THEY don’t want you to know this!!” has worked out really well for me.
It might work if your government is trustworthy, but perhaps it's trustworthy because so many people challenge it so openly. Plenty of governments cover up embarrassing parts of their history, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Remember when the US government advised people not to wear masks for Covid and social media sites enforced restricting people from talking about it?
Remember when the US invaded Iraq because they saw a chemical weapons site with some kind of decontamination truck circling the yard?
Remember Edward Snowden showing that some spying that conspiracy theorists had believed turned out to be true?
Remember the Glomar Explorer?
Did you trust everything Trump said in his role as president when it conflicted with public opinion that said he was trying to hide something?
Re: The Anxiety of Influencers
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's a comment pod?
> An engagement pod is a group (or ‘pod’) of Instagram users who band together to help increase engagement on each other’s content. This can be done through likes, comments, or follows.
Oh, noble web ring, may you continue your life in the shadows.
Re: The Anxiety of Influencers
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's a comment pod?
> An engagement pod is a group (or ‘pod’) of Instagram users who band together to help increase engagement on each other’s content. This can be done through likes, comments, or follows.
My follower count doubled in the few months when I was heavily involved with a photography collective with a pretty sizable following. Obviously being attached to the collective's brand helped, but the organic engagement we had with each other was likely a key contributing factor to my personal account's "organic growth." To do this intentionally with these latent motives strikes me with the same sadness as a distant relative's pyramid scheme sales pitch, or someone pulling the slot arm "just one more time."
Re: The Anxiety of Influencers
#189This reminds me of the advent of television, when vaudevillians such as Milton Berle made the transition to TV. A few became famous; most didn't.
Re: The Anxiety of Influencers
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> An engagement pod is a group (or ‘pod’) of Instagram users who band together to help increase engagement on each other’s content. This can be done through likes, comments, or follows.
You would think it would be trivial for an enterprising network scientist at these social media companies to identify these pods.
Pods don’t really hurt social media companies though.