6 ms·

Vercel give me nothing but very suspect vibes. I don’t know what it is exactly but reminds me a lot of the cryptocurrency crowd.

by mhoad 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
begueradj 4y ago
Vercel is like Youtube influencers
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  It's still baffling to me that a profession called influencer can exist. How do people take anything from them serious when their job description is literally taking money in order to influence people... I guess that's just our society. We love to be told what we should feel/do/care about on a societal level, so people gobble it up even if the content is obviously just paid marketing
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    It just tells you how broken the understanding of value in current society really is. When someone posting videos of themselves testing lipstick or 10 dollar dresses makes more money than dozens highly trained real engineers that build physical goods necessary for the betterment of society and the world as a whole, it does in fact explain, to some extent, why we have a child book author running the entirety of hard work of generations of people that built the German industry into the ground.
    - cercatrova 4y ago
      The labor theory of value is not real, only the subjective theory of value is. People pay for what they like. Who are you to judge why people shouldn't value others testing lipstick over some engineers?
      - TeMPOraL 4y ago
        The labor theory of value is "not real" in the sense that it doesn't correctly describe how the market works at scale. At the same time, it is real in the sense that it's a close approximation of what we consider intrinsically fair. Now, you can claim the judgement of the market should replace people's sense of fairness. In that case, there's no problem. Or, you can see the market being misaligned with our sense of fairness as a bug, and ask how it can be fixed.
        cercatrova 4y ago
        Fair. However I like your closing sentence before you edited just now: > Or, instead, you can ask how can the market be coerced to be more fair. I explicitly don't see the market being misaligned with our sense of fairness as a bug, because I am not one to judge what people like, as I mentioned. For the one making lipstick videos, I will not tell them that their work is less valuable than engineers', because, as I mentioned, it is not for me to decide. If their viewers like it, then that's good for them.
        TeMPOraL 4y ago
        > Fair. However I like your closing sentence before you edited just now: >> Or, instead, you can ask how can the market be coerced to be more fair. I edited it to make it closer to what I meant. "Coercing the market" feels too much like giving people green light to force their opinions on others, which is already a big problem in modern society, and I'm not advocating more of it. What I'm after here is what I believe is a human universal, even if fuzzy in details: the hierarchy of value based on how much one's contributing to others' well-being. It's the one that would place farmers, doctors, garbage collectors and sanitation engineers near the top, and influencers near the bottom. The way the market allocates rewards doesn't reflect the social or personal importance in any way - it reflects the ability of a person to capture rewards. Farmers, rescue workers, cleaners, etc. get little, because their work has been optimized to extreme degree. They are worse off because of scaling. Successful[0] entertainers and influencers get a lot, because they benefit from scaling - near-zero marginal cost of any additional member of the audience means that, even thought they provide small amount of value to each person and receive small reward, it adds up to a lot of money. This mechanism, few people serving a tiny value multiplied by large audience, is just one of the "money printers". There are others, like controlling the way money flows (advertisers), or skimming off the high volume of money flow (finance), etc. Point being, all those mechanisms feel like they're exploiting the structure of the market, instead of being a useful service to others. ---- [0] - Almost forgot about this, but it's probably the critical thing: these jobs are in a winner-takes-all market.
    - BoorishBears 4y ago
      What you're doing is kind of like claiming society values Powerball winners over engineers because Powerball winners make more money. > When someone posting videos of themselves testing lipstick or 10 dollar dresses makes more money than dozens highly trained real engineers that build physical goods necessary for the betterment of society and the world as a whole Some people who do that almost every single day for years eventually work up to that. For every one person who reaches that mark as an influencer there are 1000 more who do that work and make... zilch. It's like winning the lottery with a little bit of agency sprinkled in. Equity is a thing, but I don't know many engineers working for zero dollars on the hope that one day maybe they'll get lucky and become one of the minority of engineers who make any money... - Also: > why we have a child book author running the entirety of hard work of generations of people that built the German industry into the ground. huh?
    - jrochkind1 4y ago
      Very very few "influencers" make more money than engineers. ("Engineers"... when software engineers largely working on advertising and smoothing commerce to sell people garbage they don't need make more money than most "real engineers that build physical goods necessary for the betterment of society"... yeah, it's not just about the influencers, we can look in the mirror, the majority (although not all) of software engineers making mid-six-figures are probably working on selling people crap one way or another, not making anything necessary for the "betterment of society") But yeah, the vast majority of "influencers" are hustling and struggling and dreaming of being the very succesful 1% while in fact barely making enough to get by. Which seems to me important to talk about when we start talking about "influencers" as as a class or career. There are a tiny portion of "influencers" who get mega-wealthy, we hear about them because they are click bait for media coverage of course (very meta). In general, becoming a software engineer through a boot camp would be a lot more reliable way to make $100-$200K than being an "influencer" -- you don't even need to be a very good coder to break $100K, which most influencers (let alone aspiring influencers) don't break. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/feb/24/hustle-and-hype-the-truth-about-the-influencer-economy https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/feb/24/hustle-and-h... https://nealschaffer.com/how-much-do-instagram-influencers-make/ https://nealschaffer.com/how-much-do-instagram-influencers-m...
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    What's even more horrifying is that this is considered a legitimate career; in fact, it's what a lot of kids today want to be, in lieu of pursuing something socially useful. Let's be clear here: being an influencer literally means you're voluntarily accepting money for lying to people, at scale. You enrich yourself by harming others. You're actively proving you're corrupted and cannot be trusted. How people making this choice are not shunned by society is beyond me.
    - DangitBobby 4y ago
      Sales and marketing are not new.
      - hbn 4y ago
        Sales and marketing people aren't the face of the ad though. I'm more comfortable with "Coca-cola pays me money to make ads on behalf of Coca-cola" compared to "literally any company pays me to pretend I'm just a regular person who discovered this cool new product and it's so life-changing that I have to tell my loyal followers"
        tshaddox 4y ago
        So then, celebrity endorsements? Those aren't new either.
        TeMPOraL 4y ago
        Those aren't new; what's new is opening up of a whole dimension, on which celebrities are clustered on one edge. "Traditional" celebrities are widely-known, but low on "parasocial value"[0]. Influencers are less well-known, but higher on parasocial value. There's been talk of nanoinfluencing, which are very low on being well-known, very high on parasocial; I guess this just got implemented by TikTok. And it's worth highlighting what parasocial marketing means: it means exploiting natural desire of people to form bonds, in order to peddle wares. It's another kind of abusing people for profit. And yes, technically marketing on the other edge of known/parasocial spectrum isn't new either - it's occupied by people joining MLMs, who are duped into burning friendships and family ties in order to make money in a totally-not-pyramid scheme. The new thing is all the points between celebrities and MLM zombies being occupied by different kinds of influencers. ---- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    > their job description is literally taking money in order to influence people I mean, that's literally just a descirption of marketing, right? Or Public Relations. Taking money to influence people? It's a whole industry. What an influencer brings to it is that they use one person's own personal likeness as a 'brand'... and try not to disclose the extent to which they are getting paid for marketing and/or PR. Which yeah, takes an already suspicious industry and makes it both more so and more... pathetic, if that's the right word. Most attempted "influencers" are struggling/hustling without making a ton of money, but even those who are successful seem just in a sad place to me.
  - uncletaco 4y ago
    An influencer, IMO, is no different from a talk show host, radio personality, or anyone who's livelihood depends on sponsored content. We've had models in advertising forever and famous people endorse products. What's happening here is someone is getting famous outside of the traditional avenues of entertainment (radio, tv, sports, movies) through social media and getting the same sponsorship deals. They've just been given a bad name to lump them all together. I'm not a fan of the label "influencer" but I think it's nonsense to see them as a sign of societal decay. Societal change maybe, but its not dire IMO.
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      As you say, it is a job category that has existed for a long time. (In addition to examples already given, other specific titles off the top of my head spanning centuries: cigarette girls, playboy bunnies, bar girls, steak ladies, brand ambassadors, spokespersons, sign spinners, spokesmodels, …) As long as marketing has existed these jobs have also existed, they've just always before been typically given extremely specific names, often (especially in old fashioned ones) so specific even to specific genders. I think it actually is useful to have a generic term for this as well across that multi-century spectrum of too specifically named and niched sub-jobs. It makes a useful lens to even better describe our own history. ("What's a cigarette girl? Well in the height of Big Tobacco the Tobacco companies would pay ladies, generally pretty ones, to be influencers selling cigarettes at other businesses such as a bars. Many of these influencers were not employees of the bars, they were more directly contractors for the Tobacco companies.") I even think that the generic sense of revulsion many have to the specific word "influencer" is actually a useful part of that, too. These jobs were never pretty. Many were designed to be in the background marketing things to people like bad magic tricks designed to misdirect slight bits of money. Influencers are not necessarily a bad thing, and those are sometimes useful jobs in their own little ways, but having the generic term itself be a little revulsive is maybe a great reminder that they aren't always our (parasocial) friends, either, and are still trying to sell us stuff at the end of the day. (A lot of people assumed cigarette girls worked for the bars or restaurants they found them in, when really that was a direct marketing arm of the cigarette companies. Alcohol companies to this day also hire a lot of "brand ambassadors" the now gender neutral, PC term that they prefer over "influencer", though "bar girls" was also a name for that not even that many decades back, and these influencers do the exact same thing: there are people in bars selling you alcohol, with the permission of the bar owners, of course, but employed by the marketing arms of the alcohol companies. Because they aren't bar employees they are legally "allowed" to often "get more personal" and sometimes don't even pretend to be "on the clock" working. Even more fun, some of these "brand ambassadors" for alchohol are only barely paid in like product because these "brand ambassadors" are doing it "on their own" "for fun" like a rewards program and multi-level marketing had a baby that decided selling alcohol to already drunk people was a perfect business model, which is also a fun way to skirt labor laws if you can get it and maybe not obvious with a title like "brand ambassador" but a bit easier to suspect if you call it "influencer".)
  - synthc 4y ago
    It's just the evolution of a marketeer.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  apple corp.js
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  I poke around my govt sites .. they are using nextjs mostly now (previously php). New gen developers now got tricked and stuck in this era of poor quality career skills. My firmware friends even write javascript these days .. i'm like .. okay.
cheq 4y ago
Is this way of showing, very similar to an Apple keynote in tone, form, timing, presentation, etc, that is really commercial, and we are a little used to (that's the vibe it's giving). Selling their products doing this 'keynotes' talking about new exciting stuff and 'performance' increase based on my ass metrics, just to build hype and fomo, for a JS framework, it just feels odd.
yashap 4y ago
My main experience with their software is turborepo, which is IMO great. Don’t know much about their marketing or community, but turborepo is an excellent tool, much prefer it to nx and lerna (it’s main competitors).

Vercel give me nothing but very suspect vibes. I don’t know what it is exactly but reminds me a lot of the cryptocurrency crowd.

by mhoad 4y ago

Vercel give me nothing but very suspect vibes. I don’t know what it is exactly but reminds me a lot of the cryptocurrency crowd.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

begueradj 4y ago

Vercel is like Youtube influencers

411111111111111 4y ago
It's still baffling to me that a profession called influencer can exist. How do people take anything from them serious when their job description is literally taking money in order to influence people... I guess that's just our society. We love to be told what we should feel/do/care about on a societal level, so people gobble it up even if the content is obviously just paid marketing
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  It just tells you how broken the understanding of value in current society really is. When someone posting videos of themselves testing lipstick or 10 dollar dresses makes more money than dozens highly trained real engineers that build physical goods necessary for the betterment of society and the world as a whole, it does in fact explain, to some extent, why we have a child book author running the entirety of hard work of generations of people that built the German industry into the ground.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    The labor theory of value is not real, only the subjective theory of value is. People pay for what they like. Who are you to judge why people shouldn't value others testing lipstick over some engineers?
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      The labor theory of value is "not real" in the sense that it doesn't correctly describe how the market works at scale. At the same time, it is real in the sense that it's a close approximation of what we consider intrinsically fair. Now, you can claim the judgement of the market should replace people's sense of fairness. In that case, there's no problem. Or, you can see the market being misaligned with our sense of fairness as a bug, and ask how it can be fixed.
      - cercatrova 4y ago
        Fair. However I like your closing sentence before you edited just now: > Or, instead, you can ask how can the market be coerced to be more fair. I explicitly don't see the market being misaligned with our sense of fairness as a bug, because I am not one to judge what people like, as I mentioned. For the one making lipstick videos, I will not tell them that their work is less valuable than engineers', because, as I mentioned, it is not for me to decide. If their viewers like it, then that's good for them.
        TeMPOraL 4y ago
        > Fair. However I like your closing sentence before you edited just now: >> Or, instead, you can ask how can the market be coerced to be more fair. I edited it to make it closer to what I meant. "Coercing the market" feels too much like giving people green light to force their opinions on others, which is already a big problem in modern society, and I'm not advocating more of it. What I'm after here is what I believe is a human universal, even if fuzzy in details: the hierarchy of value based on how much one's contributing to others' well-being. It's the one that would place farmers, doctors, garbage collectors and sanitation engineers near the top, and influencers near the bottom. The way the market allocates rewards doesn't reflect the social or personal importance in any way - it reflects the ability of a person to capture rewards. Farmers, rescue workers, cleaners, etc. get little, because their work has been optimized to extreme degree. They are worse off because of scaling. Successful[0] entertainers and influencers get a lot, because they benefit from scaling - near-zero marginal cost of any additional member of the audience means that, even thought they provide small amount of value to each person and receive small reward, it adds up to a lot of money. This mechanism, few people serving a tiny value multiplied by large audience, is just one of the "money printers". There are others, like controlling the way money flows (advertisers), or skimming off the high volume of money flow (finance), etc. Point being, all those mechanisms feel like they're exploiting the structure of the market, instead of being a useful service to others. ---- [0] - Almost forgot about this, but it's probably the critical thing: these jobs are in a winner-takes-all market.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    What you're doing is kind of like claiming society values Powerball winners over engineers because Powerball winners make more money. > When someone posting videos of themselves testing lipstick or 10 dollar dresses makes more money than dozens highly trained real engineers that build physical goods necessary for the betterment of society and the world as a whole Some people who do that almost every single day for years eventually work up to that. For every one person who reaches that mark as an influencer there are 1000 more who do that work and make... zilch. It's like winning the lottery with a little bit of agency sprinkled in. Equity is a thing, but I don't know many engineers working for zero dollars on the hope that one day maybe they'll get lucky and become one of the minority of engineers who make any money... - Also: > why we have a child book author running the entirety of hard work of generations of people that built the German industry into the ground. huh?
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    Very very few "influencers" make more money than engineers. ("Engineers"... when software engineers largely working on advertising and smoothing commerce to sell people garbage they don't need make more money than most "real engineers that build physical goods necessary for the betterment of society"... yeah, it's not just about the influencers, we can look in the mirror, the majority (although not all) of software engineers making mid-six-figures are probably working on selling people crap one way or another, not making anything necessary for the "betterment of society") But yeah, the vast majority of "influencers" are hustling and struggling and dreaming of being the very succesful 1% while in fact barely making enough to get by. Which seems to me important to talk about when we start talking about "influencers" as as a class or career. There are a tiny portion of "influencers" who get mega-wealthy, we hear about them because they are click bait for media coverage of course (very meta). In general, becoming a software engineer through a boot camp would be a lot more reliable way to make $100-$200K than being an "influencer" -- you don't even need to be a very good coder to break $100K, which most influencers (let alone aspiring influencers) don't break. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/feb/24/hustle-and-hype-the-truth-about-the-influencer-economy https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/feb/24/hustle-and-h... https://nealschaffer.com/how-much-do-instagram-influencers-make/ https://nealschaffer.com/how-much-do-instagram-influencers-m...
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  What's even more horrifying is that this is considered a legitimate career; in fact, it's what a lot of kids today want to be, in lieu of pursuing something socially useful. Let's be clear here: being an influencer literally means you're voluntarily accepting money for lying to people, at scale. You enrich yourself by harming others. You're actively proving you're corrupted and cannot be trusted. How people making this choice are not shunned by society is beyond me.
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    Sales and marketing are not new.
    - hbn 4y ago
      Sales and marketing people aren't the face of the ad though. I'm more comfortable with "Coca-cola pays me money to make ads on behalf of Coca-cola" compared to "literally any company pays me to pretend I'm just a regular person who discovered this cool new product and it's so life-changing that I have to tell my loyal followers"
      - tshaddox 4y ago
        So then, celebrity endorsements? Those aren't new either.
        TeMPOraL 4y ago
        Those aren't new; what's new is opening up of a whole dimension, on which celebrities are clustered on one edge. "Traditional" celebrities are widely-known, but low on "parasocial value"[0]. Influencers are less well-known, but higher on parasocial value. There's been talk of nanoinfluencing, which are very low on being well-known, very high on parasocial; I guess this just got implemented by TikTok. And it's worth highlighting what parasocial marketing means: it means exploiting natural desire of people to form bonds, in order to peddle wares. It's another kind of abusing people for profit. And yes, technically marketing on the other edge of known/parasocial spectrum isn't new either - it's occupied by people joining MLMs, who are duped into burning friendships and family ties in order to make money in a totally-not-pyramid scheme. The new thing is all the points between celebrities and MLM zombies being occupied by different kinds of influencers. ---- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  > their job description is literally taking money in order to influence people I mean, that's literally just a descirption of marketing, right? Or Public Relations. Taking money to influence people? It's a whole industry. What an influencer brings to it is that they use one person's own personal likeness as a 'brand'... and try not to disclose the extent to which they are getting paid for marketing and/or PR. Which yeah, takes an already suspicious industry and makes it both more so and more... pathetic, if that's the right word. Most attempted "influencers" are struggling/hustling without making a ton of money, but even those who are successful seem just in a sad place to me.
- uncletaco 4y ago
  An influencer, IMO, is no different from a talk show host, radio personality, or anyone who's livelihood depends on sponsored content. We've had models in advertising forever and famous people endorse products. What's happening here is someone is getting famous outside of the traditional avenues of entertainment (radio, tv, sports, movies) through social media and getting the same sponsorship deals. They've just been given a bad name to lump them all together. I'm not a fan of the label "influencer" but I think it's nonsense to see them as a sign of societal decay. Societal change maybe, but its not dire IMO.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    As you say, it is a job category that has existed for a long time. (In addition to examples already given, other specific titles off the top of my head spanning centuries: cigarette girls, playboy bunnies, bar girls, steak ladies, brand ambassadors, spokespersons, sign spinners, spokesmodels, …) As long as marketing has existed these jobs have also existed, they've just always before been typically given extremely specific names, often (especially in old fashioned ones) so specific even to specific genders. I think it actually is useful to have a generic term for this as well across that multi-century spectrum of too specifically named and niched sub-jobs. It makes a useful lens to even better describe our own history. ("What's a cigarette girl? Well in the height of Big Tobacco the Tobacco companies would pay ladies, generally pretty ones, to be influencers selling cigarettes at other businesses such as a bars. Many of these influencers were not employees of the bars, they were more directly contractors for the Tobacco companies.") I even think that the generic sense of revulsion many have to the specific word "influencer" is actually a useful part of that, too. These jobs were never pretty. Many were designed to be in the background marketing things to people like bad magic tricks designed to misdirect slight bits of money. Influencers are not necessarily a bad thing, and those are sometimes useful jobs in their own little ways, but having the generic term itself be a little revulsive is maybe a great reminder that they aren't always our (parasocial) friends, either, and are still trying to sell us stuff at the end of the day. (A lot of people assumed cigarette girls worked for the bars or restaurants they found them in, when really that was a direct marketing arm of the cigarette companies. Alcohol companies to this day also hire a lot of "brand ambassadors" the now gender neutral, PC term that they prefer over "influencer", though "bar girls" was also a name for that not even that many decades back, and these influencers do the exact same thing: there are people in bars selling you alcohol, with the permission of the bar owners, of course, but employed by the marketing arms of the alcohol companies. Because they aren't bar employees they are legally "allowed" to often "get more personal" and sometimes don't even pretend to be "on the clock" working. Even more fun, some of these "brand ambassadors" for alchohol are only barely paid in like product because these "brand ambassadors" are doing it "on their own" "for fun" like a rewards program and multi-level marketing had a baby that decided selling alcohol to already drunk people was a perfect business model, which is also a fun way to skirt labor laws if you can get it and maybe not obvious with a title like "brand ambassador" but a bit easier to suspect if you call it "influencer".)
- synthc 4y ago
  It's just the evolution of a marketeer.
agumonkey 4y ago
apple corp.js
Existenceblinks 4y ago
I poke around my govt sites .. they are using nextjs mostly now (previously php). New gen developers now got tricked and stuck in this era of poor quality career skills. My firmware friends even write javascript these days .. i'm like .. okay.

cheq 4y ago

Is this way of showing, very similar to an Apple keynote in tone, form, timing, presentation, etc, that is really commercial, and we are a little used to (that's the vibe it's giving). Selling their products doing this 'keynotes' talking about new exciting stuff and 'performance' increase based on my ass metrics, just to build hype and fomo, for a JS framework, it just feels odd.

yashap 4y ago

My main experience with their software is turborepo, which is IMO great. Don’t know much about their marketing or community, but turborepo is an excellent tool, much prefer it to nx and lerna (it’s main competitors).