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An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy
- PaulHoule 7y agoIt's a older problem than Instagram. One reason why people don't trust experts is that they see fake experts like Cokie Roberts and Jim Cramer on TV all day.
- sverige 7y agoI checked out a few "influencers" out of curiosity when I first heard the term. It's far worse than Cokie and Cramer. I mean, at least they are mildly interesting to watch or listen to. The new sort seemed invariably dull and vacuous to me. Unwatchable, unlistenable, unreadable, like Season 4 of 'Do you poop enough' on channel 138. I'm not even that picky. I figured it must be mostly fake.
- terryschiavo22 7y agoHow about Dr. Oz instead of Jim Cramer?
- hprotagonist 7y agoeven worse.
- dralley 7y agoSadly, Dr. Oz is a "real expert" chasing dollar signs
- dredmorbius 7y agoWhat's Roberts' schtick?
- OnlyRepliesToBS 7y agothe money must have dried up
- Not_a_pizza 7y agoI love how articles like this make all these problems seem brand new. As if scammers never existed before the internet. The internet must be so evil.
- JustSomeNobody 7y agoThey did exist before the internet. But could they reach the masses for so little out of pocket? Could they reach as many so easily? Edit: To a degree, yes. Infomercials were wildly successful. But were there other ways?
- derekp7 7y agoOn the other hand, the Internet makes so many people aware of scams so there is less chance of any particular target falling for it. Of course, some people get so over sensitized to scams that they filter out all legitimate items to thinking it may be a scam.
- ignoramous 7y agoThat's game theory 101. The grudgers/cheaters always thrive in the long run in an environment of zero-sum, miscommunication, and mistrust. https://ncase.me/trust https://ncase.me/trust
- Nasrudith 7y agoScammers also don't need to fool all people some of the time - just some people all of the time. Nigerian Prince Scamming already filters for maximizing gullibility to reduce time wasteage.
- sverige 7y agoBack in ancient times, scammers placed small ads in the back of comic books and computer ad catalogs and gardening magazines and the like. I remember one case where a guy placed an ad that said, "Send $1 to [his P.O. box]" and made some money over the course of a few months before anyone complained. He didn't promise to send anything for the dollar, so iirc he wasn't prosecuted.
- president 7y ago> 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
- blang 7y agoThose seem like really low figures for bribes considering the average salary of a facebook employee.
- xkcd-sucks 7y ago"someone working at facebook" probably isn't an employee, most likely anything requiring case by case human discretion is a contractor position that pays shit. On the other hand, this seems like a way to legitimately take your instagram career to the next level! Networking is about who you know, not about how many people you know. Knowing a Facebook verification contractor is some pretty ironclad social proof.
- bduerst 7y agoYeah, I was thinking the same: most human-scalable data entry ops, like application review, is farmed out to contractors. That said, there's no guarantee that the contractor will be assigned your application to review. Assuming there are bribes, it likely would involve multiple people which increases it's chances of being revealed and less likely to actually be happening.
- skybrian 7y agoMaybe not for someone in customer support, though.
- nkrisc 7y agoIf your expenses equal or exceed your income, even at Facebook salary, an extra $3,000 can be crucial to keeping up the appearance of financial success.
- kodz4 7y agoWhy do we call them influencers? Why not rat catchers or pied pipers or something. Because it feels like this story is going to end, the same way the one in Hamelin did.
- zwieback 7y agoI agree with your point but the pied piper actually initially solved the problem, was cheated and then came back to take revenge by abducting/drowning the children. So the parallel doesn't really hold.
- ikeyany 7y agoLike that youtube influencer who felt cheated and took revenge by shooting up their campus?
- thatoneuser 7y agoCuz calling themselves that has made them sound valuable rather than a leach!
- hindsightbias 7y agoHow about lemming herder?
- i_am_proteus 7y agoWhat's interesting is that Facebook could easily clamp down on this: they certainly have the tools to monitor their network for "fake" accounts and identify activity by pools. Why wouldn't they? Are they counting this manufactured engagement in the figures they use to sell advertisements?
- aaronarduino 7y agoMore likely for showing "good" numbers to their investors.
- wmf 7y agoIt sounds like Instagram could just invert their algorithm from rewarding fraudsters to penalizing them.
- erobbins 7y agoBecause it's a scam all the way up. FB profits handsomely off these fake numbers.
- mic47 7y agoIt is much easier to measure amount of scam than detect. That means that company can report "cleaned up numbers" (at least with error bars) but not able distinguish all bad stuff from good stuff.
- Havoc 7y agoScams, conmen and pretenders. None of this is new and certainly doesn't mean the death of meritocracy. At most this is a conversation about how IG is enabling bad behaviour, but it's not quite end of the world territory.
- dredmorbius 7y agoJeremy Campbell, The liar's tale : a history of falsehood https://www.worldcat.org/title/liars-tale-a-history-of-falsehood/oclc/718239653 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/oclc/1009241764 https://www.worldcat.org/title/confidence-man-his-masquerade...
- HNLurker2 7y agotil 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.
- dredmorbius 7y agoQuite. 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.
- olefoo 7y agoThe meritocracy was always a sham. The "natural aristocracy of talent" is just an attempt to gaslight those cut out of the opportunities so that they will acquiesce to their exploitation.
- Nasrudith 7y agoIt depends on how one defines merit and natrual. Meritocracy technically only needs ability to determine - with no regard to fairness, potential, or optimality in how the ability is obtained. It is immaterial if the interutero cannibal shark that wins because it developed first and the consummed would have been stronger it is still the sole survivor. Actual aristocrats were better at fighting as they could afford the diet, equipment, and to train from birth essentially. They had advantages but martial abilities still ultimately provided the limit. No money or royal blood could save chevaliers from changes like establishment of pike formations, or armor piercing crossbows on the battlefield, let alone guns no matter how much they cried foul about honor. Ultimately they were part of a high value specialist-low value generalist cycle like how professional weavers did better than just any peasant in a cottage but worse than factories designed by more educated engineers but staffed with unskilled factory workers who in turn may be displaced by increased automation or cheaper labor elsewhere. So their surviving descendants "administratized" and had others do the fighting more while they ruled through other means.
- m-i-l 7y agoSee also "How I Eat for Free in NYC Using Python, Automation, AI, and Instagram"[0] for an indication as to how "easy" it is to write an algorithmic social media "influencer" with 25K followers. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19554425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19554425
- kerbalspacepro 7y agoI thought this was going to be an essential part of this article, but it seems like IEO (Instagram Engine Optimization) is actually technically boring and scammy, whereas automated IEO- while still scammy- is technically interesting!
- EliRivers 7y agoSounds like it can take a lot of money and effort to become a winner at the game of Instagram. The system has rules; you have to know them and play them in order to win. Other players know the rules too, and you know that they know that, so fun second order effects exist. I can see why it could be fun, competing with other players. Trying to keep up with whatever kind of picture (and legend behind it, I expect) scores highly, but presumably knowing that the only way to break ahead of the pack would be to take a risk on something a little bit different and win with it. Gambles and game theory and so on. Instagram isn't something that "matters", though. Is it? Does it matter how this game is played and how the winners are picked? Surely the only ethical issue is people playing who don't realise what the rules are; people who think they're playing a different game based on this "organic" growth the article discusses, so is the answer just to make sure that everyone who plays knows that's not the game anymore? The game has changed; we might as well get angry that Starcraft bouts today bear little resemblance to the slow fumblings that were seen during the first weekend on Battle.Net after Starcraft's release in 1998. Do the players need to pretend that the game is still the organic game? Maybe that's part of it; there's an audience of judges who aren't playing but give points for "authenticity", I expect. But ultimately, this is a meaningless game some people like to play; the only harm (apart from people getting so into playing the game that they take it too seriously and damage their lives, but that's true of every game) I can see comes when people think they're playing a different game, but we just need to make the game clear up front. I am way out of touch. The last online game I played with any dedication was probably Counterstrike, back when it was an 8MB alpha mod for HL (I think I've still got that executable on a CD somewhere, if it hasn't flaked with time). I never did Myspace or Facebook or any of the others, but Instagram just seems like a sharper distillation of the games that they became.
- JohnFen 7y ago> Instagram isn't something that "matters", though. Is it? I think that depends on what you count as important. It's pretty safe to assume that this sort of thing happens in every social media where people can monetize. Social media requires a certain amount of social trust to thrive, so if the health of social media generally is important to to you, this matters even if you don't use Instagram specifically. Personally, this sort of thing is one of the (but certainly not the biggest) reasons why I avoid all social media like the plague.
- Theodores 7y agoThe social media platforms benefit out of this situation. What surprises me is how similar the recommendations are when I borrow someone else's computer in a different geographical location to do some testing or want to use YouTube to look up how to do something. In these scenarios I am on a different operating system, differently gendered to normal, possibly in a borrowed account or in incognito mode. Yet I get the same lowest common denominator stuff that I get at home, logged in and with a particular history. I come away wondering how tailored those recommendations actually are. Of course they are not that tailored at all. Unless I specifically look for something whatever get recommended is going to be from a quite narrow selection. If I start out looking for a particular topic then the recommended stuff will steer me back to the same froth that everyone else gets. If I was a paranoid person I would assume that the social media giants were especially good at tracking me. But no, I have been tricked into believing recommendations are more tailored than they actually are. So why does this suit the social media companies? Well Google/Youtube is probably the case in point. Shifting those videos around costs bandwidth. They have had boxes in the telcos before now, they might as well be a virtual update to Blockbusters and only have the general small selection and not every single option, that will do for most people most of the time. Or like libraries in the olden days where you could put in a special order for any book to borrow but the local library just had a few hundred kiddies books, a few hundred books in big print for the old folks and a few reference works. There was a story on here today about how Google search results are skimping on showing us everything. I actually had not been able to find a former co-worker recently, and, thanks to the article comments I went on DDG and was able to find him. So we have a subset of information going on, the same influencers, the same search results, the same videos, this also becomes a corpus of information we rely on and, the more we rely on it, anything outside of the expected becomes alien and rejected by us. It is like eating the same food every day, variety that was once the spice of life doesn't sit well. Special knowledge is always special knowledge though. The really good stuff has few if any likes/views/reads. It is there for people who take the path required to get there. It matters not what the medium is.
- zwieback 7y agoBut does it matter, really? Instagram is for entertainment, if people are enjoying it does it matter if it's bots or actual people?
- zwaps 7y agoMan, reading this makes me so happy I don't care about social media, and I have other aspirations than trying to be a social media influencer. What a miserable feeling, chasing numbers, producing and contributing nothing real to humanity. I bet it is better for happiness and mental health to stay away from all that.
- BethGagaShaggy 7y ago>What a miserable feeling, chasing numbers, producing and contributing nothing real to humanity. Yeah. This isn't exclusive to social media influencers, though.
- blackflame7000 7y agoThe thing is, the people who do it don't know that's all they are doing. It's meaningful to them. False hope is a terrible thing.
- kmonsen 7y agoAgain, nothing special about social media/influencers here. Are not most modern jobs like this?
- zanny 7y agoThis is what honestly terrifies me more than anything - being in a dire enough financial situation to need to do bullshit work and waste my short time on this Earth for food and shelter. In my experience meaningful jobs are in insanely high demand - they substantially underpay, require substantially more qualifications, and are much more scarce than adding another cog to the cancer of finance, advertising, or business service.
- JabavuAdams 7y ago#authentic <- I don't think that means what they think it means.
- 7y ago
- olivermarks 7y agoAll these products have a beginning, a middle and an end. As more and more people clamber on board the whole thing becomes top heavy and collapses under its own weight. Hard to imagine how invasive and fake future mass platforms will be like though... The house always wins despite running a 'free' platform for people to load their content into...
- devoply 7y agoMarketing and payola was the norm and is still the norm. Don't have a clue what this dude is talking about.
- dredmorbius 7y agoDude looks like a lady: http://behindthequest.com/about/ http://behindthequest.com/about/
- droptablemain 7y agoChrist, I hate social media.
- tqi 7y agoHow do you feel about HN?
- droptablemain 7y agoWell, I'm here, aren't I? :-) HN has almost nothing in common with Instagram and Facebook.
- gcb0 7y agowould feel better if they showed "Ad" next to the fixed posts and if uBlockOrigin was able to hide them ;) other than that, I welcome our new startup investiment sentiment data harvesting overlords.
- meruru 7y agoBetter culturally than most, but too much of a timesink to be a net-positive for society.
- HNLurker2 7y agoCan't tell if sunk cost fallacy or honest. Do you use IG/other social media?
- meruru 7y agoNo. 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.
- JohnFen 7y agoDeath of meritocracy? I think something has to exist before it can die.
- ggggtez 7y agoThe shear number of typos and punctuation issues should cause anyone to question why they are taking advice from this person, exactly.
- busyant 7y ago> The shear number of typos Your being facetious, right?
- bilbo0s 7y ago>Your being facetious, right? ... Uh, did you intend to misspell that, just to drive home the point? Or did you actually make a grammatical mistake, while calling out another poster's grammatical mistake, who was him- or her- self calling out yet a third person's grammatical mistakes?
- _s 7y ago... I think both made errors there unintentionally.
- nitrogen 7y agoBoth Muphry's Law and Poe's Law seem to apply here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
- levlaz 7y agoThis exchange here is my favorite thing on HN today.
- Macross8299 7y agoTrolls trolling trolls, etc etc
- dredmorbius 7y agoNon-native speaker, generally plausible info. And as someone constantly betrayed by my Android soft-keyboard, I've considerable sympathy.
- fwip 7y agoWhen was meritocracy alive?
- ratling 7y agoThis guy keeps going on about how 'you should get everything through hard work and effort.' Bullshit, cheat. Cheat blatantly. If there's a broken obvious but unintended way to accomplish your goal do it. Otherwise one of the other billions of meatsacks roaming around the planet will do it first. Then they'll be eating your lunch.
- aj7 7y agoAs a nine-year old, I watched commercials on our black and white TV showing famous baseball players claiming they "smoked Camels." I knew then that smoking was dangerous, and that it was unlikely that the players "smoked Camels," either. So I don't get this influencer crap. I mean I really do not get it.
- enneff 7y agoHow about a less fraught and more relevant example: when a famous model with clout wears an outfit then that makes the outfit desirable.
- hi5eyes 7y agoalong with female ig influencers shilling brands/creating their own (i can count a couple girls i know making bikini brands), so many ig influencers push juuls/vape pens
- joe_hoyle 7y agoI don't think the intentional is to get people to smoke who otherwise wouldn't. It's to get the people who are going to buy cigarettes, and in doing so, chose their brand. When confronted with many choices of competing products, having someone you trust and admire favour a particular product may be enough to tip the scales and get you to take that option. I find myself doing this often, due to all the podcast ads I hear! If I'm going to buy a mattress or printed framed picture I'm going to start with I've heard about from some "influencer" I follow.
- wasdfff 7y agoBut why follow the influencer at all?
- joe_hoyle 7y agoI guess because we "follow" people who interest us or are like minded. I don't set out to "follow an influencer", but when I subscribe to a podcast, or follow someone on twitter because I find their comedy hilarious; that's what I'm doing.
- esotericn 7y agoThe use of the term "merit" in this context feels fraught with issue. One could say that, almost by definition, the individual with the most ability to game the system has the highest merit. If a poker player is able to read the opponents' faces where no-one else can - they win based on merit. The losers may well disclaim this as being some sort of 'hack'. We are speaking here about some pictures on a small, rectangular screen held in the hand.
- joe_hoyle 7y agoBased off this definition of merit, any system would be meritocratic. A politician winning elections by purchasing votes wouldn't be considered to be merit based. In poker, reading tells is an accepted part of the game and within the rules. It's my understanding that most of the tactics reported in the article are against Instagram's rules.
- Zenbit_UX 7y agoSomethings are part of the rules by virtue of the alternative being uninforceable.
- pitt1980 7y agoSo who is paying the scam Instagram influencers? My impression is that who’s interested in this sort of service is something like small start up fashion brands that can’t afford an actual celebrity. My brother makes independent video games, at one point he was approached by someone who offered to broker deal with Twitch streamers to promote one of his games. How real the popularity of these streamers really was, effects whether this might have been a good idea or not. Whether that evokes your sympathy or not, I guess the moral of the story, of you’re in the market for purchasing influencer services, buyer beware
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Nasrudith 7y agoThe streamers seem to be some of the more honest "influencers" acting as entertainers. At least ones I follow (there are many subgroupings within) will disclose if they have any special connections or contractual obligations (can't show this cutscene or boss fight prerelease), sponsorships, or even if they just received a free copy. I would advise treating unaffiliated middlemen as scammers like those offering jobs for money. (If there is some affiliated group of streamers and they handle communications that is fine.) If you want cheap marketing releasing some free copies generate no to marginal expenses. It is respectful to all involved - you are giving away a few potential sales in exchange for a potential larger market, they can give it a fair shake and let people know what they think. The viral effect can be real but it seems to depend on its own merits even if the "merit" is a gimmick like being hillariously glitchy.
- ilovecaching 7y agoI think you could look at the value of an influencer as providing an aesthetic, much like an artist, but the kicker is that the influencer is driving ads and is part of a consumerist architecture. While true art is nourishing, influencing is about depriving someone of contentment by making them want something they don't have. I also think when we see people who are paid a lot, we want to like them, and feel as though they are contributing proportional to their pay. We want to know that they're working hard, and making a difference on society, not just for themselves, in a positive way. The influencer culture is weird, and I would feel weird making so much money essentially being an ad-person.
- gcb0 7y agowould be very entertaining to see you being offered that option.
- ilovecaching 7y agoI'm sure there's a point where ego takes over and you start to believe in your own godhood and essential utility to humanity. :)
- snickerbockers 7y ago>I’m no Mother Teresa, I did my fair share of light-cheating at the beginning of this dark age Ok then.
- Noumenon72 7y agoI was just skimming, but did anyone else get the impression this guy was actually trying to teach people how to cheat, with the complaining tone just for deniability?
- xkcd-sucks 7y ago"submarine PR"
- levlaz 7y agoThis post was written by a woman, fwiw.
- jrochkind1 7y agoThe OP is suggesting that some "influencers" who get paid to say/show they like something on instagram are "fake" because... they mislead the people who pay them about how many 'followers' they have? But other people are more "authentically" doing paid product placement, still without necessarily disclosing that to those they "influence"? I am unimpressed. It sounds like they're saying that only some people truly have earned the right to get rich scamming the rubes.
- cortesoft 7y agoWell, this was written by one of those 'influencers' who is upset that she is having to compete with 'fake' influencers for ad dollars.
- mc32 7y agoAh, the old “poseurs” trope. It’s all fake and all about superficial selling of an image. I’m not sure if a new poser is any worse than a legacy influencer.
- xkcd-sucks 7y agoAnd who is making money by doing a "submarine" PR piece on "influencer services"
- exelius 7y agoI think it’s about them misleading the advertisers; which is actually fraud. I know a guy who bought 50k followers for a few hundred bucks and uses it to get free shit when he travels. I seriously doubt he’s the only one doing this.
- conanbatt 7y agoAs an advertiser, you are definitely getting defrauded.
- luckylion 7y agoAre you though? It's your job to find the right "influencer" and make sure that they can deliver what you're after. If you're unsure about the realness of their followers, just put some form of tracking into the contract. For every 100 clicks on the link, they get whatever money. If all you look at are follower counts and then throw your money at them, you're just bad at your job.
- peteretep 7y agoCan't imagine this is going to be my most popular comment but... the first thing I did was Google for one of the services she's complaining about and give them $35 for one of the things she's complaining about. If it works, I'll pump more money into it. I've spent about $1,200 so far building an Instagram following -- albeit it's quite small. I'm shooting for 5,000 real, engaged followers, and willing to spend $5,000 getting it. I think it will be an asset that will easily throw off more than $5,000 of value for me. We'll see!
- CptFribble 7y agoApologies 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 rational, logical beings; rather we are emotional decision makers who largely don't understand our own opinions and preferences, where they come from, or how much "influence" comes from sources outside ourselves. The next time you decide on a particular brand of product, or vote for a particular politician, ask yourself: why do I think this? Why do I have these beliefs about how the world works, about how society should be organized, or about why people should act this way? At this point it's almost a truism to say ads work. How is the "influencer game" different from ads? A trusted source shows a product or service, and some percentage of the followers buy it. A platform has hundreds of millions of users. Some do anything necessary to capture as big a slice of that audience, and monetize it. This may be a revelation for Joe Average who knows nothing of the ad-driven-startup world, but it shouldn't be a surprise to us.
- mbesto 7y agoI agree with everything you're saying but this: > How is the "influencer game" different from ads? Big difference -> ads are specifically marked as advertisements as legally required. The legislation is wildly inconsistent for influencers (#ad etc)
- rigorman 7y agoLast decade, legislation settled on requiring bloggers to disclose all sponsored posts.
- Swizec 7y agoInfluencers aren’t ads. Influencers are product placement. Oh you thought it was a coincidence that every desk in MI5 has a Curvoiser bottle always pointing at the camera? Or that Black Panther chases a Mercedes not a Maseratti? No such thing as a brand shown by accident.
- Sheilaaliens 7y agoThis thread is flipping fascinating, so glad I found this site today. I'll be sitting here with my popcorn.
- marcus_holmes 7y agoI'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 how to achieve the "nomad lifestyle"). I'm in the lucky position of being able to code for decent money while travelling, so I get to watch them hustle their arses off trying to make it work. I would not want to be in their position. The market is declining, the competitors are increasing, and the option of going home and getting a "normal" job again feels like total failure. I get the rage in TFA's article, but all I feel is pity.
- fphilipe 7y ago> "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.
- Vinnl 7y agoI don't think that GP meant that the travelling is fake, but that the house of cards is bound to fall down or is already falling down, because only so many people can make vlogs about making a living making vlogs. For many of them, the end result might simply be having lost their savings/racked up debt, going back home and then considering themselves a failure. And many others dreaming of this lifestyle, feeling that it should be attainable, but not being able to get there themselves.
- cjslep 7y agoI 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 workers and had a great time hearing their stories.
- wjsetzer 7y agoThe site is currently dead for me. Some sort of SQL issue.
- jeena 7y agoWhat I kind of like about it is that those fake influencers burn money of advertisers without producing results by forcing ads on real people. At least in the short run this means less ads for the people which is a really good thing so I support it.
- kstenerud 7y agoThis 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 lot of money because there's not much competition in this niche. Next comes the crossover, where the exploit knowledge becomes public, and everyone now must do it because everyone else is. Next comes the shutout, where the company running things starts actively punishing bad actors, but by this time, being a bad actor is essential to survival, so people do it anyway. It becomes a game of cat-and-mouse, new exploits, new mitigations. Eventually, the company manages to fix their algorithms enough that the exploits don't offer decent marginal returns anymore, and it returns to what the company originally intended: 1% of people are successful, 99% of people make next to nothing, and the company makes shitloads. And then the new big thing comes out. The old system goes into decline and the new system starts to take over. Rinse and repeat.
- mettamage 7y agoThis is such a good overview, I feel that an academic version of this idea should be given in software development 101 classes.
- jondubois 7y agoIt'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. The only hype that my project got was that it appeared on the front page of HN a couple. of times at the beginning (this was a few years ago). Because my project grew organically (and mosly linearly) without much social hype, most users tend to be small independent developers who use it for side projects. Also it's now being used by 2 of the top 100 cryptocurrencies (by market cap). Cryptocurrencies tend to generate their own network effects.
- baroffoos 7y agoNo 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.
- jondubois 7y agoSame 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.
- jancsika 7y agoMaybe I'm super dumb but how much value could an online avatar possibly have if the mere prevalence of spam causes one's "followers" to lose their focus and meander away?
- Xelbair 7y agoI mean... weren't influencers always fake? It is in their name - they exists to influence people towards some specific outcome. For some - it is equivalent to ads, for others it is political agenda. Some might even believe in what the say and do, but first and foremost they are platform to deliver an idea. There is nothing real required from them, just an illusion of it.
- piokoch 7y agoThis 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.
- Zigurd 7y agoInfluence 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. But the first step in all these cases is to admit that influence works. Stop putting the onus on the consumer, least of all when the whole "market" leading up to the consumer is also compromised by influence. Stop claiming that influence is "free speech." It isn't. It's the corruption of free speech. Stop claiming that laws against influence are unenforceable. If influence could not be identified, it could not be remunerated. While it's often a good idea to imagine a world with fewer laws and rules, or systems that are self-correcting, the other approach needs consideration, too. Influence could be regulated, taxed, and circumscribed more tightly, with more kinds of influence prohibited by law. Bad influencing won't go away if you ignore it. That's just poisonous smugness. Influence isn't "just how things are." There's lots of influence that is already illegal. Choose to do something, or, unless you are a hermit, things will get worse.
- Nasrudith 7y agoThe 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 message which is a form of influence! Defamation laws can still affect free speech and can and have been abused to stifle truth and criticism. It is dangerously naive to think that one can just restrict "influencing" and not cause harm. Point out the mayor id taking bribes? Jail for trying to influence elections and operation of the state. Even most radically you could stop renumiation sure but that doesn't mean influence would be stopped and would only give rise to networks of "not paid for influencing" influencers.
- Zigurd 7y agoIt'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.
- rchaud 7y agoGood article. I like that it's been written in the frantic style of someone who's just discovered the dark patterns inherent in the Internet sharecropping industry. Hopefully some of the aspiring Youtuber/IG people read this and understand that the market for influencers is way past the saturation point. They own the beach, and you are a single grain of sand screaming for attention among all the other grains of sand.
- DonHopkins 7y agoThe Commoditization of Scobalization.