8 ms·

The rise of pity marketing

130 points by miiiiiike 3y ago

neonate 3y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20230824110240/https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/social-media/2023/08/rise-pity-marketing-edinburgh-fringe http://web.archive.org/web/20230824110240/https://www.newsta... https://archive.ph/RzMAw https://archive.ph/RzMAw
LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
> This manufactured pity instead blindly inflates the value of the work in question – as if to say: if the story is sad enough, the art is automatically good. This poor fool still believes that social media has a shred of authenticity left. There is no such authenticity on social media platforms, the entire system is designed to generate content that creates engagement. I think it says more about our society that people have found success in begging online than it does the beggars themselves.
- the_af 3y ago
  When it comes from corporations, I'm with you: nothing is genuine, everything is carefully manufactured to elicit an emotion (to buy and consume). But from individuals? Sure, there's astroturfing, but there's also genuine messages with no ulterior motives. Or do you think everyone posting here on HN has ulterior motives?
  - LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
    I think it all comes down to what your definition of authenticity is and acknowledging that the vast majority of social media behavior is learned to elicit some sort of reaction and not to necessarily replicate your real-life behavior and mannerisms. As far as HN goes, I find myself posting for upvotes sometimes instead of having the more nuanced conversation. It’s why I typically abandon my account around 2-3k upvotes. Even these systems reinforce our beliefs that we are always correct or more correct than someone else because we have more upvotes/karma/whatever. I don’t think everyone has ulterior motives in the sense that there’s a hidden agenda to adhere to. But I also think it’s impossible not behave in a way that reinforces the clout mechanisms that exist on all of these platforms, which ultimately does detract from authentic behavior.
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      > I typically abandon my account around 2-3k upvotes. I’ve done the same thing about three times. My rough limit is 5k. It’s time. I think HN is better than many forums but posting for karma is a motivation everywhere it is possible.
  - apsurd 3y ago
    > When it comes from corporations, I'm with you: nothing is genuine... the insight is that our culture is consumed by capitalism and so individual people actually do mimic corporations because the corporation is all mighty. hustle culture, influencers, content creators are all very literally trying to make a business of their identity. i am not judging, i am saying it's very clear what's going on. To your point, not to say authenticity is dead. There are still voices. It's by no means a given. i don't think it's unreasonable to default suspect everyone posting content online has a commercialized agenda.
  - shash7 3y ago
    Depends on who you're talking about in organic context. For instance, if you're talking about the Instagram Explore page or the Tiktok For you page, its all marketing. Literally nothing is real, everything is made to maximize engagement. If you're talking about your followers who you know in person, that will be 80% authentic at least.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Hnrobert42 3y ago
Are we sure all the examples cited were manufactured? Isn’t it possible that in a lot of the examples, someone had a bad day and other people responded with kindness?
- andsoitis 3y ago
  why would you lament your failure or your mishappenings by broadcasting to the world?
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Ordinary people do that all the time.
  - csydas 3y ago
    Hard to tell, guess it'd be great if we had an example of such a thing so we can check it by comparison. Maybe we can find such an example on twitter... But maybe it's worth challenging the question a little; what exactly is wrong with doing such a thing? What are the potential positives and negatives if one were to be more open with their failures? Are there any situations where a failure still yields positive results and an analysis of such a failure is useful? The article itself is not very good and I think the article's author tries to hard to take an alleged social media story where an emotional outburst resulted in a performer getting better sales. Already the article is extremely light on details for this story, and the story itself doesn't seem as important as the author's segue into their point about "sob stories"; I read this as a trite example to vault to a larger point that I don't think the author ever makes, but their opening sentence is quite revealing: > "There are few behaviours considered more unflattering than actively seeking pity." This premise is too much for me to accept without further elaboration from the author, as it introduces a lot of questions on this view point that I don't think the article even tries to answer. The focus on how failure should be something we don't show is very unusual, since there are so many fields where failures are part of the expected process, and you're supposed to learn and discuss failures, not hide from them. I can't really get what the article is meaning to express except a general rant about "sob stories", but the rest of the text just seems to go on regarding something about social media, and while I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to understand from it, what I did understand was the author maybe just doesn't like the format of discussion on social media and common habits on social media. That is fine, I am not big on the social media format as well, and I just choose not to use it a ton as a result. So there is something about 'sob stories' and social media we're supposed to understand, but I'm not really sure what it is. Tying it to an artist that "used their sob story to fill seats" and implying that this was a scam with extremely light details is not convincing to me.
CM30 3y ago
This reminds me of those cases where creators have faked illnesses to market their work and get attention through sympathy, which usually goes horribly wrong. For instance, folks like Belle Gibson here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-32420070 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-32420070 Or the folks documented here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/03/03/the-disturbing-case-of-the-bloggers-who-fake-death-and-disease-for-attention/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/03... Or the example that reminded me of this, when a Super Mario World modder faked having cancer so famous YouTubers like ProtonJon and Raocow would play his ROM hack on their channels. I guess that would be the logical extreme of this behaviour. Just flat out making up a sob story to get attention for your work if you don't have an actual one to market.
- pcurve 3y ago
  A famous contestant from a Korea reality show faked cancer to solicit donation. He later got caught and was basically banished. He ended up taking his life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choi_Sung-bong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choi_Sung-bong
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
GenerocUsername 3y ago
Same issue as all those so-bad-its-good movies. At first, there was legitimately bad movies being made by honest crews trying to make something. Then, once cringe got popular, a hundred made-to-be-bad movies popped up immediately which were actually just bad because they lacked authenticity.
CoolGuySteve 3y ago
The pity commercial is why I hate watching the Olympics in the US. They'll skip over half the competitors just to show us how poor and sick some athlete's mother is or whatever. Sometimes you even miss the winner while the person they were talking about doesn't even medal!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- silisili 3y ago
  That's pretty much why I don't watch AGT or anything of it's ilk. I really wish this trend would end already...
  - apsurd 3y ago
    Also shark tank. i joke with my brother: "here comes the pitch, product, gross sales, and btw i have cancer, my mom has cancer." It's a cold joke. My mom had cancer. It's not the having of cancer i'm annoyed of obviously. How in the hell is this relevant to... oh right. it's a fucking national televised show. It's competing with The Bachelorette. sigh. curmudgeons unite. i enjoyed your comment. feel seen!
    - silisili 3y ago
      Yes! I forgot about that one, one of the worst offenders. "Here is my new idea. It's a diaper for parakeets." "Why would anyone want that?" (crying) "Because, because, sorry guys. My mom passed this year and I promised myself I wouldn't cry. She just loved parakeets" "OK, here is a million dollars" The whole schtick is so ridiculous I find it pretty offensive.
      - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
        "My mom contracted cancer from touching so much parakeet guano..."
xrd 3y ago
I'm really curious to go back to Show HN posts and see if there are any interesting stories associated with the project. It would be fascinating to see if some of the stories didn't hold up but the projects benefitted from them. I bet it happens even here on HN.
mberning 3y ago
The role of shame and self respect as a social regulator has been severely diminished. Going out in public is sadly like going to a circus side show nowadays. Everything is ugly and people are very crass. Oh well, better get used to it, it’s not going to get better.
noduerme 3y ago
I wonder if this means all the great music we made as a rock band in the 90s without getting signed can get a new audience. It logically should, since pretty much everything in the genre has been some form of theft or reiteration, until everyone forgot that music like that had existed 20 years earlier and suddenly the stars aligned and ripoffs of rip-offs were considered original. (To be fair, we stole everything from the 1960s). I'd never play the pity card, though. One has to live with oneself, even if most people pretend they don't.
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  Tangential comment: we also kind of stole everything from the 1940s as well, but very few people are alive to care nowadays, or to even know about it. The "nostalgia" segment pretty much caps out in the 60s-70s now.... :)
vector_spaces 3y ago
It's an interesting phenomenon, but I feel that the article begs us to pass judgement on this behavior, and that makes the article less interesting to me. The West and much of the rest of the world have built societies with few strong kinship bonds. Not everyone has a family they can lean on for support, and we tend to lose friends as we get older rather than make new ones. So, yes, of course people will resort to eliciting support from the internet, and when it works even once people will start to learn and game the dynamics. Framing it in these terms may make it sound malicious and disingenuous, but it needn't be either. Given functional kinship bonds, humans are generally good at eliciting support from the people around them and learning what needs to be done to get the support we need. This is just a generalization to strangers. This isn't to say that there aren't disingenuous people lying to game these mechanics, of course there are. But for the sake of those that aren't, maybe let's leave them be and not raze to the ground what's emerged as a stand-in for actual social support and strong kinship ties?
- brabel 3y ago
  > the article begs us to pass judgement on this behavior The people behaving like this are the ones who are begging for judgement, probably feeling "safe" that anyone condemning them for doing it will be mobbed by the majority who will not miss their chance to virtue signal their support for the self-pittying person.
- noduerme 3y ago
  Wow. This is such an original take. I think it's utterly fascinating and borderline genius - no joke - to tie this alleged impulse for pity/sympathy to the abandonment of family bonds in western culture. That abandonment is what allows individuals to pursue all these artistic and footloose paths without having to care for their elders, but it's also what alienates them from a framework of people who would care about what they do. In my experience, so much of what you do for kinship is based on guilt, that I find it hard to trust that my kin actually care for anything I ever did. (This could just be because I'm Jewish, but go with me here for a second). My first and last fans have always been my brother and my mom, since I was 12 years old strumming a guitar, all the way through sort-of-rock touring status with a few hundred people per show, up til I'm no longer playing music but for late night solo demos to a few people. One has to ask: Are my kin only kind to my efforts out of some sense of mutual support rooted in guilt if they don't respond? I think that question kind of answers itself. So then, what about people who don't have anyone who they can email music to at 3am who has to pretend to like it? What becomes of those people? It all jives. I think you nailed it. The public pity party is directly related to lacking a family who'll bullshit and pacify you for your own good.
barefootjoey 3y ago
Lots of marketing methods. I would be interested to see their statistical effectiveness on different demographics.
Nursie 3y ago
Interesting read, but misses the pity-marketing I see most often on Facebook - dropshippers. “Local homegrown <country you are in> company going bust! Thanks to all our loyal customers. We are selling the last of our stock at 50% off!” There then follows a link to a shopify shop selling stuff from aliexpress, marked as “50% off while stocks last!” but in actuality marked up 300% or more. I find it massively scummy, and clearly it works because there’s no end of replies to most of them saying stuff like “so sorry to hear that. Can you ship to…?” Meta really does profit off the lowest, most deceptive crap.
hot_gril 3y ago
Looking at my friend's medical school applications, more than half the essay prompts were asking for sob stories. Not like when I applied to undergrad and was usually asked to describe an accomplishment.
LeonB 3y ago
Surprised this wasn’t about how Vincent Van Gogh’s tragic life (and that of his brother who owned almost all of Vincent’s artwork) was turned into a mega blockbuster.
spacecadet 3y ago
its called vegging, virtual begging. I coined it years ago when venmo was becoming the top vegging platform.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I feel that there's really no "rise," here. The difference, these days, is scale and reach; which applies to all kinds of other things. Begging is the world's [second?] oldest profession. It relies on our innate social instinct, and is pretty effective. Like most ways of making money, it gets abused. It's my thought that people who live in relative abundance, may not necessarily understand the levels of desperation that extreme poverty can engender. I have family that was very involved (and still is, into their seventies) with addressing poverty. They (I believe rightly so) think that poverty and wealth inequality may be the most pressing issue in humanity, these days, as it directly, or indirectly, affects almost all the other issues. I grew up in developing countries, and remember the "beggar pimps," that would deliberately mutilate and cripple children, in order to send them out begging. It was pretty horrifying. But I also help people that no one else wants to help (for good reason). Tough crowd. I need to enforce my own boundaries, and am pretty damn good at saying "no." Also, some of the folks we help, can turn around, and become fairly vile, once they have their asses out of the sling. Just comes with the territory. "Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know." "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." - Mark Twain
jondwillis 3y ago
Don’t use social media where this is prevalent? “I don’t like this because I had to do it another way”
alexalx666 3y ago
Sensationalism around mundane is the curse of our times. BREAKING: Artists are starving.
treis 3y ago
I really don't like this article. It's not pity. Say there's some comic or some author legitimately struggling. A lot of people will see someone in that situation and want to help them. And it's not pity. It's because they're ducking tired of the money they spend ending up in some billionaires pocket or returned to the shareholders. These posts are an opportunity to see your money go to actually help someone. Like maybe it's the difference between them having to work some shitty job or getting to have their hobby pay their bills. That's a good feeling and that's the value people are chasing. Even if they tell crappy jokes or write boring books... who cares? It's not like some marginal comic eeking out a living telling bad jokes is such a tragedy. Whatever economic waste there is in letting some marginal comic eek out a living on bad jokes pales in comparison to billionaires.
ogou 3y ago
Intersectional trauma is the new exceptionalism.

130 points by miiiiiike 3y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20230824110240/https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/social-media/2023/08/rise-pity-marketing-edinburgh-fringe http://web.archive.org/web/20230824110240/https://www.newsta... https://archive.ph/RzMAw https://archive.ph/RzMAw

LapsangGuzzler 3y ago

> This manufactured pity instead blindly inflates the value of the work in question – as if to say: if the story is sad enough, the art is automatically good. This poor fool still believes that social media has a shred of authenticity left. There is no such authenticity on social media platforms, the entire system is designed to generate content that creates engagement. I think it says more about our society that people have found success in begging online than it does the beggars themselves.

the_af 3y ago
When it comes from corporations, I'm with you: nothing is genuine, everything is carefully manufactured to elicit an emotion (to buy and consume). But from individuals? Sure, there's astroturfing, but there's also genuine messages with no ulterior motives. Or do you think everyone posting here on HN has ulterior motives?
- LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
  I think it all comes down to what your definition of authenticity is and acknowledging that the vast majority of social media behavior is learned to elicit some sort of reaction and not to necessarily replicate your real-life behavior and mannerisms. As far as HN goes, I find myself posting for upvotes sometimes instead of having the more nuanced conversation. It’s why I typically abandon my account around 2-3k upvotes. Even these systems reinforce our beliefs that we are always correct or more correct than someone else because we have more upvotes/karma/whatever. I don’t think everyone has ulterior motives in the sense that there’s a hidden agenda to adhere to. But I also think it’s impossible not behave in a way that reinforces the clout mechanisms that exist on all of these platforms, which ultimately does detract from authentic behavior.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    > I typically abandon my account around 2-3k upvotes. I’ve done the same thing about three times. My rough limit is 5k. It’s time. I think HN is better than many forums but posting for karma is a motivation everywhere it is possible.
- apsurd 3y ago
  > When it comes from corporations, I'm with you: nothing is genuine... the insight is that our culture is consumed by capitalism and so individual people actually do mimic corporations because the corporation is all mighty. hustle culture, influencers, content creators are all very literally trying to make a business of their identity. i am not judging, i am saying it's very clear what's going on. To your point, not to say authenticity is dead. There are still voices. It's by no means a given. i don't think it's unreasonable to default suspect everyone posting content online has a commercialized agenda.
- shash7 3y ago
  Depends on who you're talking about in organic context. For instance, if you're talking about the Instagram Explore page or the Tiktok For you page, its all marketing. Literally nothing is real, everything is made to maximize engagement. If you're talking about your followers who you know in person, that will be 80% authentic at least.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Hnrobert42 3y ago

Are we sure all the examples cited were manufactured? Isn’t it possible that in a lot of the examples, someone had a bad day and other people responded with kindness?

andsoitis 3y ago
why would you lament your failure or your mishappenings by broadcasting to the world?
- tptacek 3y ago
  Ordinary people do that all the time.
- csydas 3y ago
  Hard to tell, guess it'd be great if we had an example of such a thing so we can check it by comparison. Maybe we can find such an example on twitter... But maybe it's worth challenging the question a little; what exactly is wrong with doing such a thing? What are the potential positives and negatives if one were to be more open with their failures? Are there any situations where a failure still yields positive results and an analysis of such a failure is useful? The article itself is not very good and I think the article's author tries to hard to take an alleged social media story where an emotional outburst resulted in a performer getting better sales. Already the article is extremely light on details for this story, and the story itself doesn't seem as important as the author's segue into their point about "sob stories"; I read this as a trite example to vault to a larger point that I don't think the author ever makes, but their opening sentence is quite revealing: > "There are few behaviours considered more unflattering than actively seeking pity." This premise is too much for me to accept without further elaboration from the author, as it introduces a lot of questions on this view point that I don't think the article even tries to answer. The focus on how failure should be something we don't show is very unusual, since there are so many fields where failures are part of the expected process, and you're supposed to learn and discuss failures, not hide from them. I can't really get what the article is meaning to express except a general rant about "sob stories", but the rest of the text just seems to go on regarding something about social media, and while I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to understand from it, what I did understand was the author maybe just doesn't like the format of discussion on social media and common habits on social media. That is fine, I am not big on the social media format as well, and I just choose not to use it a ton as a result. So there is something about 'sob stories' and social media we're supposed to understand, but I'm not really sure what it is. Tying it to an artist that "used their sob story to fill seats" and implying that this was a scam with extremely light details is not convincing to me.

CM30 3y ago

This reminds me of those cases where creators have faked illnesses to market their work and get attention through sympathy, which usually goes horribly wrong. For instance, folks like Belle Gibson here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-32420070 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-32420070 Or the folks documented here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/03/03/the-disturbing-case-of-the-bloggers-who-fake-death-and-disease-for-attention/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/03... Or the example that reminded me of this, when a Super Mario World modder faked having cancer so famous YouTubers like ProtonJon and Raocow would play his ROM hack on their channels. I guess that would be the logical extreme of this behaviour. Just flat out making up a sob story to get attention for your work if you don't have an actual one to market.

pcurve 3y ago
A famous contestant from a Korea reality show faked cancer to solicit donation. He later got caught and was basically banished. He ended up taking his life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choi_Sung-bong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choi_Sung-bong
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

GenerocUsername 3y ago

Same issue as all those so-bad-its-good movies. At first, there was legitimately bad movies being made by honest crews trying to make something. Then, once cringe got popular, a hundred made-to-be-bad movies popped up immediately which were actually just bad because they lacked authenticity.

CoolGuySteve 3y ago

The pity commercial is why I hate watching the Olympics in the US. They'll skip over half the competitors just to show us how poor and sick some athlete's mother is or whatever. Sometimes you even miss the winner while the person they were talking about doesn't even medal!

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
silisili 3y ago
That's pretty much why I don't watch AGT or anything of it's ilk. I really wish this trend would end already...
- apsurd 3y ago
  Also shark tank. i joke with my brother: "here comes the pitch, product, gross sales, and btw i have cancer, my mom has cancer." It's a cold joke. My mom had cancer. It's not the having of cancer i'm annoyed of obviously. How in the hell is this relevant to... oh right. it's a fucking national televised show. It's competing with The Bachelorette. sigh. curmudgeons unite. i enjoyed your comment. feel seen!
  - silisili 3y ago
    Yes! I forgot about that one, one of the worst offenders. "Here is my new idea. It's a diaper for parakeets." "Why would anyone want that?" (crying) "Because, because, sorry guys. My mom passed this year and I promised myself I wouldn't cry. She just loved parakeets" "OK, here is a million dollars" The whole schtick is so ridiculous I find it pretty offensive.
    - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      "My mom contracted cancer from touching so much parakeet guano..."

xrd 3y ago

I'm really curious to go back to Show HN posts and see if there are any interesting stories associated with the project. It would be fascinating to see if some of the stories didn't hold up but the projects benefitted from them. I bet it happens even here on HN.

mberning 3y ago

The role of shame and self respect as a social regulator has been severely diminished. Going out in public is sadly like going to a circus side show nowadays. Everything is ugly and people are very crass. Oh well, better get used to it, it’s not going to get better.

noduerme 3y ago

I wonder if this means all the great music we made as a rock band in the 90s without getting signed can get a new audience. It logically should, since pretty much everything in the genre has been some form of theft or reiteration, until everyone forgot that music like that had existed 20 years earlier and suddenly the stars aligned and ripoffs of rip-offs were considered original. (To be fair, we stole everything from the 1960s). I'd never play the pity card, though. One has to live with oneself, even if most people pretend they don't.

Pannoniae 3y ago
Tangential comment: we also kind of stole everything from the 1940s as well, but very few people are alive to care nowadays, or to even know about it. The "nostalgia" segment pretty much caps out in the 60s-70s now.... :)

vector_spaces 3y ago

It's an interesting phenomenon, but I feel that the article begs us to pass judgement on this behavior, and that makes the article less interesting to me. The West and much of the rest of the world have built societies with few strong kinship bonds. Not everyone has a family they can lean on for support, and we tend to lose friends as we get older rather than make new ones. So, yes, of course people will resort to eliciting support from the internet, and when it works even once people will start to learn and game the dynamics. Framing it in these terms may make it sound malicious and disingenuous, but it needn't be either. Given functional kinship bonds, humans are generally good at eliciting support from the people around them and learning what needs to be done to get the support we need. This is just a generalization to strangers. This isn't to say that there aren't disingenuous people lying to game these mechanics, of course there are. But for the sake of those that aren't, maybe let's leave them be and not raze to the ground what's emerged as a stand-in for actual social support and strong kinship ties?

brabel 3y ago
> the article begs us to pass judgement on this behavior The people behaving like this are the ones who are begging for judgement, probably feeling "safe" that anyone condemning them for doing it will be mobbed by the majority who will not miss their chance to virtue signal their support for the self-pittying person.
noduerme 3y ago
Wow. This is such an original take. I think it's utterly fascinating and borderline genius - no joke - to tie this alleged impulse for pity/sympathy to the abandonment of family bonds in western culture. That abandonment is what allows individuals to pursue all these artistic and footloose paths without having to care for their elders, but it's also what alienates them from a framework of people who would care about what they do. In my experience, so much of what you do for kinship is based on guilt, that I find it hard to trust that my kin actually care for anything I ever did. (This could just be because I'm Jewish, but go with me here for a second). My first and last fans have always been my brother and my mom, since I was 12 years old strumming a guitar, all the way through sort-of-rock touring status with a few hundred people per show, up til I'm no longer playing music but for late night solo demos to a few people. One has to ask: Are my kin only kind to my efforts out of some sense of mutual support rooted in guilt if they don't respond? I think that question kind of answers itself. So then, what about people who don't have anyone who they can email music to at 3am who has to pretend to like it? What becomes of those people? It all jives. I think you nailed it. The public pity party is directly related to lacking a family who'll bullshit and pacify you for your own good.

barefootjoey 3y ago

Lots of marketing methods. I would be interested to see their statistical effectiveness on different demographics.

Nursie 3y ago

Interesting read, but misses the pity-marketing I see most often on Facebook - dropshippers. “Local homegrown <country you are in> company going bust! Thanks to all our loyal customers. We are selling the last of our stock at 50% off!” There then follows a link to a shopify shop selling stuff from aliexpress, marked as “50% off while stocks last!” but in actuality marked up 300% or more. I find it massively scummy, and clearly it works because there’s no end of replies to most of them saying stuff like “so sorry to hear that. Can you ship to…?” Meta really does profit off the lowest, most deceptive crap.

hot_gril 3y ago

Looking at my friend's medical school applications, more than half the essay prompts were asking for sob stories. Not like when I applied to undergrad and was usually asked to describe an accomplishment.

LeonB 3y ago

Surprised this wasn’t about how Vincent Van Gogh’s tragic life (and that of his brother who owned almost all of Vincent’s artwork) was turned into a mega blockbuster.

spacecadet 3y ago

its called vegging, virtual begging. I coined it years ago when venmo was becoming the top vegging platform.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I feel that there's really no "rise," here. The difference, these days, is scale and reach; which applies to all kinds of other things. Begging is the world's [second?] oldest profession. It relies on our innate social instinct, and is pretty effective. Like most ways of making money, it gets abused. It's my thought that people who live in relative abundance, may not necessarily understand the levels of desperation that extreme poverty can engender. I have family that was very involved (and still is, into their seventies) with addressing poverty. They (I believe rightly so) think that poverty and wealth inequality may be the most pressing issue in humanity, these days, as it directly, or indirectly, affects almost all the other issues. I grew up in developing countries, and remember the "beggar pimps," that would deliberately mutilate and cripple children, in order to send them out begging. It was pretty horrifying. But I also help people that no one else wants to help (for good reason). Tough crowd. I need to enforce my own boundaries, and am pretty damn good at saying "no." Also, some of the folks we help, can turn around, and become fairly vile, once they have their asses out of the sling. Just comes with the territory. "Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know." "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." - Mark Twain

jondwillis 3y ago

Don’t use social media where this is prevalent? “I don’t like this because I had to do it another way”

alexalx666 3y ago

Sensationalism around mundane is the curse of our times. BREAKING: Artists are starving.

treis 3y ago

I really don't like this article. It's not pity. Say there's some comic or some author legitimately struggling. A lot of people will see someone in that situation and want to help them. And it's not pity. It's because they're ducking tired of the money they spend ending up in some billionaires pocket or returned to the shareholders. These posts are an opportunity to see your money go to actually help someone. Like maybe it's the difference between them having to work some shitty job or getting to have their hobby pay their bills. That's a good feeling and that's the value people are chasing. Even if they tell crappy jokes or write boring books... who cares? It's not like some marginal comic eeking out a living telling bad jokes is such a tragedy. Whatever economic waste there is in letting some marginal comic eek out a living on bad jokes pales in comparison to billionaires.

ogou 3y ago

Intersectional trauma is the new exceptionalism.