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Reminds me 18th century Paris where professional applauders and influencers were paid to influence the crowd. Or the retro seo trick where you ask a question o
by 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
Reminds me 18th century Paris where professional applauders and influencers were paid to influence the crowd.
Or the retro seo trick where you ask a question on yahoo questions so you can answer it with another account to backlink "relevant" website.
Literally nothing new, internet has of course changed the scale and took away the monopoly from newspapers and tv.
- growlist 7y agoPre-YouTube, fashion companies would employ companies to identify the cool kids in a group and give them free stuff to wear, in order to promote the brand.
- saagarjha 7y agoIs this not still a thing for Instagram “influencers”?
- skocznymroczny 7y agoI guess nowadays you don't need companies to tell you who the cool kid is because you can just look at followers count.
- ivolimmen 7y agoThere is even a movie about that "The Joneses"
- stephenmm 7y agoTo me this is exactly the problem of our times and should not be trivialized. Were there too few gatekeepers of news in the past? Maybe, but the "new" problem is that it has become too efficient (IMO) to spread misinformation while peoples ability and tolerance to spend time on researching the facts has diminished. To say it another way, misinformation/obfuscation/misdirection are not new but the scale of it is and it is critical for us to come up with better solutions to deal with it than we have today. Our climate and our democracies depend on it.
- cortesoft 7y agoSure, it is not a new problem, but we have to solve it again, and perhaps with a different solution given the new medium.
- naringas 7y agohow was it solved in 18th century Paris? was it solved? I think that culture just sort of "evolves" out of the problem?
- ls612 7y agoIt was “solved” by the wholesale bloody massacre of those who lived in the upper strata of society and their families. Not the sort of solution you’d want replicated.
- ahje 7y ago> how was it solved in 18th century Paris? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
- stevenwoo 7y agoThe TV series Rome (set around Julius Caesar's era) shows a guy orating/reading the daily news which was generally propaganda for whomever was in power, in the making of the accompanying the series, a consultant claims this was historically accurate. Several details in the series seem fantastical to modern viewers but have some historical basis.
- lainga 7y agoYes, and the guy is one of the few characters to survive each regime change. Gaius! (shovels) Julius! (shovels) Caesar!
- bduerst 7y ago>Or the retro seo trick where you ask a question on yahoo questions so you can answer it with another account to backlink "relevant" website. So, Quora?