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Earlier quoted context omitted.
This person steals content from others. They don't add anything. They didn't create a website either - they're just scraping content to steal. And they steal that content for actual financial benefit of free food rather so it isn't innocent. This is totally scummy.
We say that but people who follow the account or like his posts must have found some value.
I find this fairly repugnant. In the same way that dumpster diving also gets you free food - but you are essentially a parasite, living on the waste of others. At least with the dumpster diving, the relationship is clear. He generates literally nothing of value here - everything is stolen from others. I truly hope we end up with the same social aversions to things like this that we do for other taboo social activitie…
Person creates website with some content. Person verifiably has 25k people looking at it at least sometimes. Restaurants give him a meal in exchange for ad space(sponsored review). Other than further polluting the new web with fake bullshit content, there doesn't seem to be anything immoral about it. It just "feels" a bit scummy. But hey, a man's gotta eat.
This person steals content from others. They don't add anything. They didn't create a website either - they're just scraping content to steal. And they steal that content for actual financial benefit of free food rather so it isn't innocent. This is totally scummy.
In the context of this discussion, though, I think the "website" analogy fits just fine.
> The beauty of this all is that I automated the whole thing. And I mean 100% of it. I wrote code that finds these pictures or videos, makes a caption, adds hashtags, credits where the picture or video comes from, weeds out bad or spammy posts, posts them, follows and unfollows users, likes pictures, monitors my inbox, and most importantly — both direct messages and emails restaurants about a potential promotion. Sin…
That would have been so much more interesting of a blog post; I'd love to see a write up that does some investigative work to determine just how much of engagement on instagram is driven by scripts.
> Makes me want to write a short story (I wish I had movie making talents for a short movie) where social media bots keep reposting content and sending heart emojis to each other after the future where Putin's nukes killed us all
I may just post this as written to reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/ :)
I find this fairly repugnant. In the same way that dumpster diving also gets you free food - but you are essentially a parasite, living on the waste of others. At least with the dumpster diving, the relationship is clear. He generates literally nothing of value here - everything is stolen from others. I truly hope we end up with the same social aversions to things like this that we do for other taboo social activitie…
This is the opposite, in that we are as a species probably less well off, but its not really any more destructive than other forms of astroturfing (marketers and robots pretending to be real people).
I find this fairly repugnant. In the same way that dumpster diving also gets you free food - but you are essentially a parasite, living on the waste of others. At least with the dumpster diving, the relationship is clear. He generates literally nothing of value here - everything is stolen from others. I truly hope we end up with the same social aversions to things like this that we do for other taboo social activitie…
I agree that it's scummy, but I don't think he creates "nothing of value." How is this any different from influencers promoting and following brands manually? He's created a curated feed of NYC pictures that thousands of people follow and like. There is value in that, and the restaurants offering him free meals proves it. I wish he had posted about his follow-ups with the restaurants (does he actually tag them & prom…
I agree that he's no different than other "influencers". I would just contend that they also create nothing of value.