Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy

behindthequest.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 211 posts

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

#201

Post by omginternets »

smolder wrote: post #193
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…

Advertising is unethical in my opinion when it lies or misleads, or it fosters fears and impulses that negatively impact individuals quality of life, or their social contribution and therefore others' QoL. One example is advertising toys to kids during kids programming: most of this is done in a way that makes kids feel left out for not having the toys, relies on FOMO, envy, and molds susceptible children into more j…

>Advertising is unethical in my opinion when it lies or misleads, or it fosters fears and impulses that negatively impact individuals quality of life, or their social contribution and therefore others' QoL

Hard to disagree with that, but this is very different from the parent poster's claim.

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

#202

Post by nilskidoo »

exolymph wrote: post #107
nilskidoo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people honestly wanted or needed a particular thing, then marketing would be irrelevant. We've been manufacturing demand to meet supply for decades now. It is fundamentally a disingenuous act.

This is ridiculous. There are about a zillion products and brands out there that people didn't know about until they found out through marketing. Also, lol @ commenting on Hacker News to rail against marketing. This is literally a lead-gen site for YC

Jesus surrounded himself with lepers, whores and thieves. I'm sincerely not trolling here, I just don't see a point in preaching only to the choir. I respect values of information here, like how Snowden landing in Honk Kong was announced here before any other website. But comfort zones, echo chambers, safe spaces and news bubbles are the same as any gated community, in that they block out most of reality by design. Including quite a lot of truth.

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

#203

Post by nilskidoo »

mikekchar wrote: post #141
nilskidoo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people honestly wanted or needed a particular thing, then marketing would be irrelevant. We've been manufacturing demand to meet supply for decades now. It is fundamentally a disingenuous act.

You seriously want a Hunky Bill's Perogie Maker. The only reason you don't know that you want one is because you didn't grow up in Winnipeg. But trust me. You want one. It's a shame that you will read this on HN and you will dismiss it as a stupid joke and you almost certainly won't go out and order a Hunky Bill's Perogie Maker -- all because you didn't watch 100's of hours of cartoons on Saturday mornings in Winnipe…

But there is a difference between an opinion, like the earnest word of mouth bit concerning personal experience, and people paid entirely too much to convince strangers how incomplete they are. There was a lot of history before Bernays taught the western world to underestimate the universe. A return to landscapes free of billboards could be as therapeutic as aesthetic, but we'll never know that again.

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

#204

Post by rchaud »

ip26 wrote: post #105
nilskidoo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people honestly wanted or needed a particular thing, then marketing would be irrelevant. We've been manufacturing demand to meet supply for decades now. It is fundamentally a disingenuous act.

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…

> this was one of their big challenges. We made something brilliant, but hardly anyone understands why it matters.

Is this the "decentralized internet" product, or the initial Pied Piper product? SV the show is very accurate in some ways, but how did it take them until Season 2 to discover that average consumers don't give a crap about a hard-to-use, seemingly B2B-focused app that compresses their pictures?

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

#205

Post by mikekchar »

nilskidoo wrote: post #203
mikekchar wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seriously want a Hunky Bill's Perogie Maker. The only reason you don't know that you want one is because you didn't grow up in Winnipeg. But trust me. You want one. It's a shame that you will read this on HN and you will dismiss it as a stupid joke and you almost certainly won't go out and order a Hunky Bill's Perogie Maker -- all because you didn't watch 100's of hours of cartoons on Saturday mornings in Winnipe…

But there is a difference between an opinion, like the earnest word of mouth bit concerning personal experience, and people paid entirely too much to convince strangers how incomplete they are. There was a lot of history before Bernays taught the western world to underestimate the universe. A return to landscapes free of billboards could be as therapeutic as aesthetic, but we'll never know that again.

I'll admit that I heartily agree with you there. I think my only point was that marketing is not inherently bad. It's just the extremes that we take it to.

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

#206

Post by QuantumGood »

Jedi72 wrote: post #92
CptFribble wrote: post #76

Apologies if this is too meta, but all the claims of "ugh so glad I don't care about social media" and "what do influencers am I right????" feel really, really disingenuous on a forum run by a silicon valley incubator, where discussions of building products that run on advertisements regularly take place. I think there's a deeper truth that most people, including us here on HN, don't want to admit: humans are at not…

There is a deeper truth that marketing people (like yourself I am guessing?) don't want to admit: what you do is wrong. To it's very core. You're attempting to take away people's free will, using the dirtiest tactics one could imagine. Emotional manipulation, exploiting peoples insecurities, their need to feel a certain level of status from their peers: these are staple tactics of a marketer, and social media influen…

They may be staple tactics, but they are by no means universal tactics. Just as you realize right from wrong, so do others. And some of us have to solve marketing problems.

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

#207

Post by dredmorbius »

HNLurker2 wrote: post #103
dredmorbius wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeremy Campbell, The liar's tale : a history of falsehood https://www.worldcat.org/title/liars-tale-a-history-of-false... Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man : His Masquerade https://www.worldcat.org/title/confidence-man-his-masquerade...

til that con-man means confidence man as in the past people where foolish enough to trust people confident to be their friends and then asked for their watches (surprisingly they trusted) and thus stealing them.

Quite.

The role of easy travel (Mississippi steamboat in Melville's tale), or communications (mail, newspapers, telegraph, telephone, Intenet, ...), is also notable.

The Greek god Hermes (Mercury) represented travel, messengers, and tricksters. I find this interesting.

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

#208

Post by Zigurd »

Nasrudith wrote: post #194
Zigurd wrote: post #172

Influence works. If it didn't, nobody would practice it. Some forms of influence are clearly illegal. But there are vast gray areas, like pharma sales, where doctors are offered speaking fees to "speak" to an empty room near a nice beach. I would throw both the doctor and the pill pusher into a dark hole and throw away the key and that would save our society tens, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars and many lives.…

The funny thing is advertising is an area where it is hard to determine /why/ something was successful. Is it the ad campaign or because the new flavor is that good? If you could give perfect attribution of influence on outcomes you should probably be a world changing billionaire already. Anything which affects speech affects free speech "corruption" had nothing to do with it. The goal of speech is to spread a messag…

It's hard to catch money laundering. It is very likely that a lot of money laundering goes on undeterred by law. But still it's illegal. The way it is detected is by demanding that the banks themselves alert authorities to possible money laundering.

Similarly because social media platforms have the analytics to detect advertising masquerading as influencers, this type of unregulated advertising could be brought under regulation by requiring social media platforms to report it.

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

#210

Post by shadowprofile76 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #35
blang wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those seem like really low figures for bribes considering the average salary of a facebook employee.

It's pretty common for bribes to be pretty cheap compared to the gain. Same in DC. The ROI for lobbying is enormous. Spend a few million to get billions in subsidies or tax cuts.

Exactly and the simple reason why, which keeps these basic economics of bribery working so robustly, is the asymmetric measures of value/cost inherent to the two sides of the equation. A government or facebook employee or whomever who has access to some lever worth a great deal will sell access to it for these fairly small sums exactly because the much greater value isn't actually a cost to them. They're leveraging their access to someone elses resources for personal acquisition of a much smaller but to them worthwhile gain. You'd never convince a billionaire to sell you access to something of theirs worth billions by paying them only millions, but, like you said, you can easily convince a senator to give you access to billions in government resources (tax money) for a few million to their personal campaign.
Post reply on HN