The original meaning of ‘influencer’ isn’t a stand-alone occupation or job title. It was meant to be anyone who has rapport with a specific demographic and a si

The original meaning of ‘influencer’ isn’t a stand-alone occupation or job title. It was meant to be anyone who has rapport with a specific demographic and a significant enough following that they can, literally, influence a significant number of people. Paul Graham, for example, has a large audience of people who read his essays and Tweets. If he publishes an essay, it hits the front page of Hacker News and is widely read. Not everyone consumes his writings blindly or without debate, but the debate furthers engagement with his material and is therefore a net expansion of his influence. Paul Graham is an influencer. Some degree of content creation, from Tweets to Instagram content to essays or Substacks, is necessary to engage an audience to receive the influence. That’s why influencers and content creators are one in the same, as the article highlights: > In many ways, the distinction between influencer and creator is the product of longstanding critical divisions between art (seen as organically created) and mass culture (seen as manufactured and dangerous). Influencer suggests a mode of distracting and sedating the public, creating generations of docile consumers. Creator reaches into a different tradition. The modern definition of ‘influencer’ has deviated to become pejorative. In many contexts, such as Hacker News, it has become an insult that means someone doesn’t produce valuable content, but rather presents a fake front through social media in order to sell things to their uninformed followers. It’s not a good look, which is why people only use the term influencer to describe people they dislike, or people that they don’t personally follow. Few people would admit that Paul Graham or the Substacks they subscribe to or their Twitter follows are also influencers, because we don’t like to think of ourselves as being able to be influenced. However, by the original meaning of influencer that’s exactly what they are. The term ‘influencer’ now has too many negative connotations to be useful any more in public conversation as anything other than an insult or dismissal. It’s still useful in the context of discussing PR or advertising, but it’s on my list of terms to simply avoid due to how it might be received.