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There was a shop that said to influencers they could get a discount only after 30 people used their specific influencer promo code. None of them did (or could d

• mc32 7y ago
  It looks like most of that behavior is a sham and brands are waking up to that. Hopefully people in general are waking up to the sham and don’t get influenced by shallow actors.
• deleted 7y ago
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• wcunning 7y ago
  I hesitate to defend a Facebook property, but here goes anyway... My Instagram feed is 100% welding, machining and a small smattering of woodworking. Literally any project I post gets universally positive feedback, with the occasional constructive suggestion. If I ask for help on a project, I get advice in at most a few hours from someone with 40 years more experience than I have. Contrast this to the forum community for the same thing that has a disturbing tendency to flame out and generally mock newbies. What I take away from this is that Instagram, like all metaphorical tools, is what you make of it. If you only follow beautiful people, you may only get shallow content. If you follow interesting people who share interesting things, you'll get interesting content.
  • hiven 7y ago
    Completely agree. I do however think the way the instagram app works you are guided down a path littered with product sales pages, advertising and general mundane materialism. I think at its core this culture is good for their business model.
    • stochastic_monk 7y ago
      Without hawking other items, they’re mostly just making instagram money. I’m not saying it’s good, but the it’s the expected behavior for this incentive structure.
    • asdff 7y ago
      Somehow I've grown blind to the ads on instagram. I know they are there, if I actively look for them I will find them, but if I close my eyes cannot picture the contents of any ad I've seen lately on on Instagram. When I scroll through the feed it's like I've subconsciously trained myself to immediately scroll past and ignore sponsored posts, and immediately click past sponsored stories. I can't be the only one in this boat.
  • bryanthompson 7y ago
    Same here. I only follow woodworkers and immediately unfollow anyone who gets outside the line of what i want in my feed. It has allowed me to find interesting niches in the hobby and connect with people with 10x the skill who like teaching and talking about technique, but it takes a pretty brutal type of curating to keep the influencers & garbage out.
    • wcunning 7y ago
      This comment is surely too late, but I feel like it's worth preserving. I think the woodworking community is more prone to that than the metalworking community. I hate to say it, but I think it's a question of barrier to entry. It's hard to be dilettante in metalworking when it requires a huge investment and moving tens of thousands of pounds of equipment.
  • 7y ago
• ses1984 7y ago
  >used their specific influencer promo code. This is like the difference between old web advertising pay per click and new web advertising pay per impression. Getting someone to use a code is an order of magnitude harder to get than a click through. If you think you are going to get more than just an impression, you're delusional. And most impressions are fake.
• Reedx 7y ago
  Even worse are the kid influencers on YouTube. Kids advertising to other kids. And parents trying to turn their own kids into influencers. The whole thing is just gross.
  • HNLurker2 7y ago
    you mean parents forcefully making their children prodigies in teenis, chess etc. is bad? same goes with youtubers
    • michaelmrose 7y ago
      You don't see the difference between Chess and trying to be famous for being famous?
    • sushid 7y ago
      I think there's huge amount of difference between chess or tennis prodigies promoting their activity by teaching kids the proper techniques vs. Timmy unboxing a new box of Legos and dunking them in Jello #sponsored.
    • JasonFruit 7y ago
      Tennis, chess, violin, singing — these are at least skills that may be valuable later in life. "Instagram influencer" is a net negative for the kid's future. But, yes, I'd say parents making their children excel at anything by force are doing it wrong, and not setting them up for lifelong satisfaction.
  • smnplk 7y ago
    Yep, some parents are really making narcissistic douchebags
• cgriswald 7y ago
  > There was a shop that said to influencers they could get a discount only after 30 people used their specific influencer promo code. None of them did (or could do) it. I'm not convinced that's a fair measure. Instagram, YouTube, and maybe a couple of things are some of the few advertisements that actually reach me. I run an adblocker and don't watch TV commercials. The ads are generally about things I like, I find them non-offensive, and I have actually made purchases as a result. > It’s highly ineffective and for the most part it’s just some entitled person with an inflated ego demanding freebies. I have an "insta-famous" dog more as a hobby than anything, and businesses often offer us things for free or deeply discounted in exchange for fair review and a post with our dog; we never offer/ask. We also have had (major brand) businesses who wanted us to shoot pictures of our dog with their product for their website for free, with no attribution, and with no discount or free products. So, from my perspective, the businesses aren't exactly being taken advantage of here.
• matwood 7y ago
  > It’s highly ineffective Other than a click through and sale, it's hard for any advertising to prove effectiveness. Yet, there are still ads on TV and the radio. For many brands, small influencers are a cheap way (some free product and maybe some money) to keep product in front of people when thought of in aggregate.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > Other than a click through and sale, it's hard for any advertising to prove effectiveness. Advertising industry has a vested interest in keeping things this way, and only maintain perception of effectiveness to milk customers.
    • asdff 7y ago
      Then what happens when competing ad agency calls up your client and explains how bullshit your metrics are? Advertisers compete more than they collude, we don't have a cartel (yet).
      • TeMPOraL 7y ago
        How would they know what my metrics are? Chances are, their whole business is based on pulling the same bullshit as I am anyway. Competition in an industry whose core competency is lying to people doesn't breed trust.
• dubliner2077 7y ago
  I dont have Facebook as I found it stupid as fuck when it started. I dont have Instagram cause why the fuck I would? I don't even have a LinkedIn since I like privacy on my carreer and because I wanted to do it before it existed lol I have a "read only" Twitter to follow some friends and technical people which I barely use. You know what the problem is? Dota2, Hearthstone, Overwatch... Too much time "wasted".
  • criddell 7y ago
    > I dont have [social network] cause why the fuck I would? Because you have friends, family, and former coworkers in far away places that you enjoy keeping in touch with. It's one thing to write them an email or letter regularly, but it's also nice to open the app and see a random picture of your nephew at the zoo or see a pic from an office birthday gathering or maybe a short clip of a former coworker playing their new guitar. It's a low friction, low effort way to stay connected and it generates happiness.
    • cgriswald 7y ago
      > it's also nice to open the app and see a random picture of your nephew at the zoo or see a pic from an office birthday gathering or maybe a short clip of a former coworker playing their new guitar. Serious question: Is there a social network that allows me to do any of those things anymore? The first 10 things on my Facebook feed are: 1. My own un-republished 'memory'. 2. A 'humorous' re-post. 3. Someone else's re-published memory of a humorous re-post. 4. A scammy ad. 5. A photo from someone I know posted to someone I know that I have no interest in. 6. A real person status (in large text with obnoxious background that I thought was a re-post of some meme). 7. A humorous re-post. 8. "People You May Know" 9. A real, honest to god, set of pictures of family and friends. 10. Someone else's memory of a humorous re-post. If I'm honest, I care about (6) but I'd like it to be actual text, and (9). (5) is acceptable because depending on the photo I'm sometimes interested. So at best we're looking at 30% of content I want, 10% ads, 10% FB trying to sink its claws a little deeper, and 50% other noise. I know I can make my experience better by doing certain things. But those things move around, change, and feel like switches that don't do anything plugged into a black box that just does whatever it wants. So, I'm kind of at a place of 'why bother'. Instagram mostly works for me, but its photo-oriented and most of the people I know on it are my younger friends. Twitter is a mess. Anything else I've heard of none of my friends or family use.
• jacobolus 7y ago
  > it is the antithesis of the issue Friendly nitpick: antithesis means the opposite of something. You probably want epitome, archetype, exemplar, quintessence, apotheosis, or similar.
• lowdose 7y ago
  For the most part you are right. But isn't this the normal outcome of a successful business model eventually attracting many imposters because they hear about pros making money. Companies like Traackr offer saas services to analyze the social graph to make a massive impact with 30 real influencers. This service starts at $30k and they delivered for watch brands and telcos primetime media exposure to millions of potential customers without directly advertising. If so many people are doing something it probably means some of them are actually making a ton of cash. https://www.traackr.com/ https://www.traackr.com/
• faeyanpiraat 7y ago
  It is a complicated issue, because if you are reviewing products in a niche, and producing truly useful content around it, then getting all the stuff for retail price could be prohibitively expensive. And doing all of that for hoping that posting the content with a promo code MAY refer 30 people, so that you could get the same item at a discount? That seems unreasonable. On the other hand, I have 1st hand experience on how hard it is doing marketing profitably. You are throwing most of your money straight out the window, most campaigns bring in 0 conversions, some even 0 impressions.. So being a busy businessperson juggling all the daily operations stuff, being so done with the bullshit marketing opportunities bringing in nothing, and the freebie seeker influencers, why would this next person asking for stuff be different?
• rungekuttarob 7y ago
  Apologies for my "lmfao" comment after reading hiven's post. The comment didn't add anything to the conversation and was a dumb mistake.