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The Anxiety of Influencers

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Re: The Anxiety of Influencers

#61

Post by Applejinx »

seattle_spring wrote: post #3

Wow, the subject influencers in the article were insufferable just to read about. I can't think of any group I have less empathy for than them. The world would be such a better place if the concept of an "influencer" completely ceased to exist.

They're children. Or possibly animals, like show ponies or show poodles. Theirs is not to ask why, or to have a free thought in their head.

If they were being raised to be slaughtered, you might have an easier time finding empathy, even when this raising is not doing great at giving them human qualities. Well, they ARE being raised to be slaughtered, in a slightly more abstract sense. I think empathy is completely reasonable.

The thing is you have to have empathy for what they MIGHT have been if they weren't yanked out of normal life, kept from growing up or seeing any reality, and trained to be incredibly vacant and damaged. You're seeing human beings getting ruined. Maybe they could have been a lot better if they didn't get sucked into this madness.

Re: The Anxiety of Influencers

#62

Post by redisman »

anm89 wrote: post #7

I find this topic interesting but the style of writing is intolerable

Eh yeah. “I’m so over educated I can’t relate to normal people anymore”. I miss David Foster Wallace. At least he understood humans. https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazi...

Re: The Anxiety of Influencers

#65

Post by Applejinx »

seibelj wrote: post #47
ptd wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re being asked to consider the possibility that your family experiences have influenced this view. Not that you are incorrect, or even correct, the parent statement is simply saying you hold this belief because if you’re experiences.

Only on HN would advocating for the importance of family be rabidly downvoted. Family is a universal component of human civilization. Our current president has repeatedly stated the utmost importance of his family, as has every president. What makes family bonds so strong is that they won’t turn your back on you when you are in a bind. They are much stronger than friends. Stable households are the most important pred…

One of the reasons I'm a HN type is that I'm the type of entrepreneur who will beat himself into the ground to get to my results, no matter what it takes.

Part of the reason for this is that when I was much younger, my family DID turn their back on me, and I became homeless, and I was treated as a black sheep loser all my life and was compelled to reach for other things. I did not have friends for the most part, and my family ties were much worse than that, and I dreaded any connections I had to have.

Made for a lot of free time to work on things that interested me. I was happier during the holidays when I'd got past whatever obligations I even had, those being as minimal as possible.

It didn't make me a good person. It made me a bad person. I've spent years trying to overcome that badness, with some success, despite not getting a lot of reason to bother: I didn't grow up with any sort of positive role models or connections (Dad having rage and guilt issues, and Mom literally being a secret heroin addict). I'd probably be dead if Mom hadn't got clean, then got me clean (we were both so miserable that any change seemed exciting) and started a long slow road towards being less toxic.

You will find damaged people without the importance of family (in a normal sense) among the most significant and influential people in hacker culture, and in SV unicorn culture. These are the people who ride the unicorns, because they aren't normal and aren't good people… just inhumanly driven.

GOOD family makes for good people. Good people aren't always what you look for when you're trying to make the next billion-dollar tech unicorn. Certainly not in leadership.

Re: The Anxiety of Influencers

#66

Post by exporectomy »

peteretep wrote: post #50

> According to a poll released in 2019, some 54 percent of Americans between the ages of thirteen and thirty-eight would, if given the chance, become a social-media influencer. A whopping 23 percent believed that this term already fit them. EDIT: Jesus, this article is the gift that keeps giving: > Later, when I ask Chase [about the veracity of the video he] explains that the video must be legit because “it’s gotten…

> 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 people make the opposite mistake of trusting authorities and I think we need both types if we're going to have either. A country full of conformist sheep of any sort would be at risk of some sort of totalitarianism or other political disaster.

Re: The Anxiety of Influencers

#67

Post by peteretep »

exporectomy wrote: post #66
peteretep wrote: post #50

> According to a poll released in 2019, some 54 percent of Americans between the ages of thirteen and thirty-eight would, if given the chance, become a social-media influencer. A whopping 23 percent believed that this term already fit them. EDIT: Jesus, this article is the gift that keeps giving: > Later, when I ask Chase [about the veracity of the video he] explains that the video must be legit because “it’s gotten…

> 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.

Re: The Anxiety of Influencers

#68

Post by dillondoyle »

seattle_spring wrote: post #3

Wow, the subject influencers in the article were insufferable just to read about. I can't think of any group I have less empathy for than them. The world would be such a better place if the concept of an "influencer" completely ceased to exist.

I kind of had a similar reaction but about the author!

It read like he used an auto-thesaurus, or purposefully chooses more esoteric words simply to up the contrast between how he sees himself - the professor writing smart think pieces whilst going for tenure - versus those dumb vapid teenagers.

Re: The Anxiety of Influencers

#69

Post by sircastor »

inreverse wrote: post #56
peteretep wrote: post #50

> According to a poll released in 2019, some 54 percent of Americans between the ages of thirteen and thirty-eight would, if given the chance, become a social-media influencer. A whopping 23 percent believed that this term already fit them. EDIT: Jesus, this article is the gift that keeps giving: > Later, when I ask Chase [about the veracity of the video he] explains that the video must be legit because “it’s gotten…

I would love the source for this. It seems too ridiculous to be true unless they're using a non-standard definition of 'influencer'.

What is the standard definition of influencer? Is there some standard being set? And by what body?

Re: The Anxiety of Influencers

#70

Post by pureliquidhw »

DC-3 wrote: post #21

Hope they have the brains to not burn their income as soon as it hits their bank accounts. This sort of popularity can surely not last more than a few years in almost all instances.

But what about nostalgia? AVGN came back recently and I love it. I also didn't watch for years between. I wonder if it's potentially cyclical over one and done.
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