8 ms·

> "People who effortlessly shift from “web3 is the future” to “I will explain to you why ‘AI’ will replace you”" to make money it helps to insert yourself betw

> "People who effortlessly shift from “web3 is the future” to “I will explain to you why ‘AI’ will replace you”" to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every business works. social media made it possible for anyone(?) to gain a following and so put themselves as a kind of authoritative middle man and act as a conduit for advertisers between people and thing they want > "It was no longer about the actual qualities of the medium, not about videos or music or stories or essays etc. Everything one made was just content." and the grift part came from the idea that the substance of the product itself doesn't matter as much as just getting yourself in the middle. getting a monopoly on eyeballs that are interested in the thing a good example is those youtube farms that churn out history and economics videos where the presenter doesn't even know what he's saying, just reading words all day. content at the end they are all selling the same thing, the idea of some happiness or entertainment

keithalewis 3y ago
> at the end they are all selling the same thing, the idea of some happiness or entertainment "Dreams are a wish fulfilled." Freud might have been on to something. Or even his nephew Bernays.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
xwolfi 3y ago
But web3 cannot be the future of anything, it's pure grift. There's no business, nobody's busy: it's all smoke and mirror.
- lusus_naturae 3y ago
  I know this is the prevailing narrative (and I am guilty of it as well), I have just one question then: why are reasonable and intelligent academics/engineers working on things like MetaGov, https://metagov.org https://metagov.org? These people are not grifting, as far as I can tell.
  - BoxFour 3y ago
    I can't comment on these specific individuals, but it's worth noting that both academics and engineers are fully capable, and at times even driven, to engage in grifting. Off the top of my head: There was recently a fairly famous instance of an academic at Harvard who was suspended for falsifying data.
    - lusus_naturae 3y ago
      That's an understandable stance, I am aware of the Harvard/Gino controversy as well. But I think the reason why communities, organizations, and institutions are still effective and able to achieve work with undeniable intellectual or social impact (e.g., full self-driving in certain conditions or reducing the transmission rate of COVID during the pandemic) is because people still act in good faith and harbor good will because they believe that others are doing the same. I think this two-way trust ensures the rate of progress, which is why it is such a target for disinformation campaigns (i.e., all your values are lies or all your institutions hate you/want to abuse you etc.). So I think given a large group of academics/engineers and looking at the way people in groups behave, I am not inclined to believe that a large proportion of such academics/engineers are grifting, but it is easier to believe that perhaps there is deception in the upper echelons of such a community/organization that is imperceptible to collaborators lower in the hierarchy. I guess the question becomes how do recognize grift or deception unless you establish people like the academics who exposed people like Gino. Do we just need more of that?
      - BoxFour 3y ago
        There's scant evidence to suggest that modern academics uphold more stringent standards than any other group of professionals. If I were to modify your initial statement to indicate the involvement of a group of reasonably intelligent attorneys, would that possess the same level of persuasiveness for you? It’s similarly persuasive to me no matter which group you use in your original statement (attorneys or academics). Which is to say - not very.
        3y ago
- meiraleal 3y ago
  > But web3 cannot be the future of anything, it's pure grift. There's no business, nobody's busy: it's all smoke and mirror. Meanwhile, Central Banks all around the world are rolling blockchain-based systems to use as the future infrastructure of all their transactions, bypassing external middlemen like Visa and Mastercard. There is real tech coming from web3 and P2P computing will take over cloud computing sooner or later.
  - ahamm 3y ago
    Evidence?
    - meiraleal 3y ago
      "Harnessing the power of blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), DREX will facilitate peer-to-peer transactions without the need for an intermediary, leveraging smart contracts for the automatic execution of transactions." https://cryptoslate.com/brazil-to-launch-cbdc-drex-in-2024-said-to-improve-financial-accessibility-amid-centralization-concerns/ https://cryptoslate.com/brazil-to-launch-cbdc-drex-in-2024-s...
  - otp209 3y ago
    Centralization is just the natural order. No one actually wants to "be their own bank" or credit union. Who needs the headache? It's like how libertarians are constantly surprised in the rare instances that they get what they supposedly want that it turns out they didn't want it at all, but rather their idealized version. Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it ""decentralized"". Which is why it does end up being centralized, just around the management of a handful of resource collectives.
    - meiraleal 3y ago
      At some point it becomes so easy that people start to wonder why they pay a middleman for no benefit. > Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it ""decentralized"". Let the cryptobros be wrong. Decentralized computing isn't about crypto, it is about reusing idle resource to create something bigger than big tech. BitTorrent is real, fediverse is real, IPFS...
- envsubst 3y ago
  I am so confused why HN is so tolerant of startup grifting, but dismisses cryptocurrency as an absolute evil. Are concepts like proof of work not even interesting? I would rather have fast and cheap online payments than a chat bot I have to twist around until I can talk to customer service.
  - mattmcknight 3y ago
    > fast and cheap online payments but proof of work / crypto isn't fast, and nothing makes it particularly cheap. If we are talking fast and cheap online payments, micropayments instead of subscriptions, let's go. Too much of crypto is a solution looking for a problem (and finding ones that don't fit).
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Are concepts like proof of work not even interesting? PoW only addresses a single problematic aspect of this stuff (and only reduces it, doesn't actually resolve it). It does nothing about all the other problematic aspects.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > Are concepts like proof of work not even interesting? Sure, but we had that with SETI@home, and then Folding@home, and they were doing something useful with their work rather than just finding which random numbers hashed a certain way in order to get a token whose primary economic value was the assumption that "remove trust" is a useful thing in economics. We also had a blockchain of sorts before bitcoin, and still regularly use it: it's called "git". And we already have fast and cheap online payments. In my case this was initially in the form of paypal, then my banks got good at it more directly; in Kenya since 2005, and now more countries in the region, there's a thing called M-PESA which does much the same but works with pre-feature-phones: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M-Pesa_on_Nokia_1100_20120430.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M-Pesa_on_Nokia_1100...
  - notsurenymore 3y ago
    > am so confused why HN is so tolerant of startup grifting, but dismisses cryptocurrency as an absolute evil I mean.. it’s a site associated with a notable VC organization.
delfinom 3y ago
>at the end they are all selling the same thing, the idea of some happiness or entertainment They aren't selling anything. They are simply feeding idle brains with content in exchange for shotgunning topics for ad revenue.
- HenryBemis 3y ago
  I used to believe that TV channels were there to offer entertainment, news, education, and to fund this they had advertisements. Today it is clear that these are businesses that are there to make profit, and the "content" is only there to spread the advertisements apart. I was catching-up to the Coffeezilla's videos, and it looks like the scammers-be-scamming. And some people will try their 'luck' with anything fringe-y (forex, NFTs, crypto, AI, etc.)
  - bandrami 3y ago
    A tv station's product is its audience, except for the "prestige" no-ads cable stations. Having worked in TV, i promise you they are very clear about this. The programming exists to attract the product.
gumby 3y ago
> to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every business works. Even though there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of grifters and rentiers, it's unreasonable to say that "this is how pretty much every business works". If you buy a car the mfr is hardly inserting themselves between something you could have without them. Same for a haircut, a restaurant, or the food the restaurant used, for that matter. There is even a small segment of the banking industry that does more than just insert itself and charge a toll!
- nerdponx 3y ago
  Of course they do. Toyota inserts itself between me and my need to go places.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    In this case transportation grift is a trillion dollar problem in the US, but maybe slightly different than you're saying. A huge portion of US infrastructure is built on the idea that no one in their right mind would walk to it. Our shops are box islands in multi acre oceans of black asphalt. Vast arteries of concrete separate people from where they live to where they buy. So, yea I would say there is plenty of grift at different levels.
    - nerdponx 3y ago
      I think we have a different interpretation of "between". I just meant that they see a costly thing that people do, and they do something to reduce that cost. That basically is what all companies do. I believe that's what GP meant as well, but apparently everyone else interpreted it differently.
    - rewmie 3y ago
      > A huge portion of US infrastructure is built on the idea that no one in their right mind would walk to it. No one in their right mind would want to walk to any business in the US due to its urban planning and transport infrastructure. Even biking is an absurd risk that only rare people dare to make. In the US it's not abnormal to express the length of even mundane car trips in how many hours you spend driving. That's definitely not a halmark of a walkable region.
book1976 3y ago
> to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every business works. Sure this might be true. Also true that changing topic every three months is a sure way to ruin your reputation
- morelisp 3y ago
  At least one SV luminary founded his empire on the idea you could "become an expert" on any topic in four weeks and shift between them constantly. Even after explaining the grift his star is still fairly bright.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    But, in all fairness, SV loves and celebrates grifters.
SergeAx 3y ago
No. Pretty much every business works like this: you BUILD something people (will) want and sell it to them. Even if you are a retailer, you still build a shop from shelves, showcases, cashier desks and so on and you build a logistic system to supply it with goods.
JohnFen 3y ago
> to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every business works. That's how bad businesses work. Good businesses provide a solution to a real problem, instead.
- fnovd 3y ago
  I'm not sure what your nitpick is supposed to be getting at. Good businesses create a solution to your problem and then "insert themselves" between you and that solution. That's how they make money. If they could not stand in the middle and charge you for access, there would be no incentive to create the solution.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I don't think I was nitpicking at all. "inserting themselves between" two things is very, very different than providing a solution to a problem. > Good businesses create a solution to your problem and then "insert themselves" between you and that solution. I cannot wrap my head around this framing at all. Businesses that provide a solution aren't inserting themselves between anything. They're offering a solution directly.
    - fnovd 3y ago
      Think about any software company with a large sales team. The people writing the software are not the people selling the software. Writing software and offering it to people does not sustain a business. Creating IP and then finding creative ways to charge people for it does. The sales team that "inserts themselves between" your problem and the solution the product team has created is a core part of the business, a sine qua non.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        The sales team and the dev team are both a part of the same team.
      - 3y ago
Aurornis 3y ago
> to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every business works. I disagree. They’re not the same thing. Most businesses will provide solutions to a need, or at least facilitate getting you to the solution for a fee. The social media grifters are doing something else. They’re finding people with a need (or tricking people into thinking they have a need) and then trying to capture that person as a follower and, eventually, a revenue stream while delivering little real value in exchange. The prototypical social media grifter like this has a lot to say and a lot of strongly worded opinions, but the end game usually involves something like hiding the “real” answers inside of a paid course or paid community. They spend years building a following on social media and then suddenly they’re selling a course for $1000 per seat. They only need a few hundred of their million followers to convert to make a decent amount of money. The content is usually so-so or recycled from other books and courses. Often purchasers are so embarrassed about having paid $1000 for it that they won’t complain online. If they do complain, they get dunked on by other social media users who were smart enough to see the grift, so they delete their complaints. I’ve followed many people on Twitter who started out doing good work on indie projects or small startups, built up a following, and then pivoted into selling courses and educational material to their followers. An alternative grift is to build up a following and then carefully walk the line on “offering the opportunity” to invest in their newest business. A handful of their star-struck followers will be knocking down their door to hand over their cash. You see it a lot with real estate and self storage business influencers.
Zenquin 3y ago
"that churn out history and economics videos" Can you provide some examples?
JeremyNT 3y ago
I feel like this isn't a new phenomenon, it's just been democratized. As with Jeff Kramer and other business talking heads who will gladly tell you how you can make money by just following their advice, if somebody really had the secrets to "get rich quick" they wouldn't go around selling that to you. In the age of "web3" (and now AI) hype, there's no longer one Jeff Kramer - there are thousands, millions of them, inserting themselves in peoples' feeds instead of into their TVs. Now countless grifters are out there, selling themselves as arcane wizards who can lead the gullible masses to financial success. Unlike Kramer (who is bound by a legal framework that at least tries to protect public from outright grifts in traditional media), though, this new generation is basically free to outright lie with complete impunity.
rewmie 3y ago
> to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every business works. This might be the rentiers scheme, but that's hardly how any economy works. A bakery hardly inserts itself between the very bread it makes and the client who wants to buy it. Even logistics companies, the epitome of a middleman, delivers critical value. > social media made it possible for anyone(?) to gain a following and so put themselves as a kind of authoritative middle man and act as a conduit for advertisers between people and thing they want I don't think this is true. Marketing is not a middleman. Raising awareness of a product and/or service is not the same thing as making impossible deals possible. Likewise, newspapers from a couple of decades ago were not middlemen in any of the adverts they printed, or is YouTube a middleman in any of the adverts it shoves between videos.

keithalewis 3y ago

> at the end they are all selling the same thing, the idea of some happiness or entertainment "Dreams are a wish fulfilled." Freud might have been on to something. Or even his nephew Bernays.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

xwolfi 3y ago

But web3 cannot be the future of anything, it's pure grift. There's no business, nobody's busy: it's all smoke and mirror.

lusus_naturae 3y ago
I know this is the prevailing narrative (and I am guilty of it as well), I have just one question then: why are reasonable and intelligent academics/engineers working on things like MetaGov, https://metagov.org https://metagov.org? These people are not grifting, as far as I can tell.
- BoxFour 3y ago
  I can't comment on these specific individuals, but it's worth noting that both academics and engineers are fully capable, and at times even driven, to engage in grifting. Off the top of my head: There was recently a fairly famous instance of an academic at Harvard who was suspended for falsifying data.
  - lusus_naturae 3y ago
    That's an understandable stance, I am aware of the Harvard/Gino controversy as well. But I think the reason why communities, organizations, and institutions are still effective and able to achieve work with undeniable intellectual or social impact (e.g., full self-driving in certain conditions or reducing the transmission rate of COVID during the pandemic) is because people still act in good faith and harbor good will because they believe that others are doing the same. I think this two-way trust ensures the rate of progress, which is why it is such a target for disinformation campaigns (i.e., all your values are lies or all your institutions hate you/want to abuse you etc.). So I think given a large group of academics/engineers and looking at the way people in groups behave, I am not inclined to believe that a large proportion of such academics/engineers are grifting, but it is easier to believe that perhaps there is deception in the upper echelons of such a community/organization that is imperceptible to collaborators lower in the hierarchy. I guess the question becomes how do recognize grift or deception unless you establish people like the academics who exposed people like Gino. Do we just need more of that?
    - BoxFour 3y ago
      There's scant evidence to suggest that modern academics uphold more stringent standards than any other group of professionals. If I were to modify your initial statement to indicate the involvement of a group of reasonably intelligent attorneys, would that possess the same level of persuasiveness for you? It’s similarly persuasive to me no matter which group you use in your original statement (attorneys or academics). Which is to say - not very.
      - 3y ago
meiraleal 3y ago
> But web3 cannot be the future of anything, it's pure grift. There's no business, nobody's busy: it's all smoke and mirror. Meanwhile, Central Banks all around the world are rolling blockchain-based systems to use as the future infrastructure of all their transactions, bypassing external middlemen like Visa and Mastercard. There is real tech coming from web3 and P2P computing will take over cloud computing sooner or later.
- ahamm 3y ago
  Evidence?
  - meiraleal 3y ago
    "Harnessing the power of blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), DREX will facilitate peer-to-peer transactions without the need for an intermediary, leveraging smart contracts for the automatic execution of transactions." https://cryptoslate.com/brazil-to-launch-cbdc-drex-in-2024-said-to-improve-financial-accessibility-amid-centralization-concerns/ https://cryptoslate.com/brazil-to-launch-cbdc-drex-in-2024-s...
- otp209 3y ago
  Centralization is just the natural order. No one actually wants to "be their own bank" or credit union. Who needs the headache? It's like how libertarians are constantly surprised in the rare instances that they get what they supposedly want that it turns out they didn't want it at all, but rather their idealized version. Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it ""decentralized"". Which is why it does end up being centralized, just around the management of a handful of resource collectives.
  - meiraleal 3y ago
    At some point it becomes so easy that people start to wonder why they pay a middleman for no benefit. > Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it ""decentralized"". Let the cryptobros be wrong. Decentralized computing isn't about crypto, it is about reusing idle resource to create something bigger than big tech. BitTorrent is real, fediverse is real, IPFS...
envsubst 3y ago
I am so confused why HN is so tolerant of startup grifting, but dismisses cryptocurrency as an absolute evil. Are concepts like proof of work not even interesting? I would rather have fast and cheap online payments than a chat bot I have to twist around until I can talk to customer service.
- mattmcknight 3y ago
  > fast and cheap online payments but proof of work / crypto isn't fast, and nothing makes it particularly cheap. If we are talking fast and cheap online payments, micropayments instead of subscriptions, let's go. Too much of crypto is a solution looking for a problem (and finding ones that don't fit).
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Are concepts like proof of work not even interesting? PoW only addresses a single problematic aspect of this stuff (and only reduces it, doesn't actually resolve it). It does nothing about all the other problematic aspects.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > Are concepts like proof of work not even interesting? Sure, but we had that with SETI@home, and then Folding@home, and they were doing something useful with their work rather than just finding which random numbers hashed a certain way in order to get a token whose primary economic value was the assumption that "remove trust" is a useful thing in economics. We also had a blockchain of sorts before bitcoin, and still regularly use it: it's called "git". And we already have fast and cheap online payments. In my case this was initially in the form of paypal, then my banks got good at it more directly; in Kenya since 2005, and now more countries in the region, there's a thing called M-PESA which does much the same but works with pre-feature-phones: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M-Pesa_on_Nokia_1100_20120430.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M-Pesa_on_Nokia_1100...
- notsurenymore 3y ago
  > am so confused why HN is so tolerant of startup grifting, but dismisses cryptocurrency as an absolute evil I mean.. it’s a site associated with a notable VC organization.

delfinom 3y ago

>at the end they are all selling the same thing, the idea of some happiness or entertainment They aren't selling anything. They are simply feeding idle brains with content in exchange for shotgunning topics for ad revenue.

HenryBemis 3y ago
I used to believe that TV channels were there to offer entertainment, news, education, and to fund this they had advertisements. Today it is clear that these are businesses that are there to make profit, and the "content" is only there to spread the advertisements apart. I was catching-up to the Coffeezilla's videos, and it looks like the scammers-be-scamming. And some people will try their 'luck' with anything fringe-y (forex, NFTs, crypto, AI, etc.)
- bandrami 3y ago
  A tv station's product is its audience, except for the "prestige" no-ads cable stations. Having worked in TV, i promise you they are very clear about this. The programming exists to attract the product.

gumby 3y ago

> to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every business works. Even though there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of grifters and rentiers, it's unreasonable to say that "this is how pretty much every business works". If you buy a car the mfr is hardly inserting themselves between something you could have without them. Same for a haircut, a restaurant, or the food the restaurant used, for that matter. There is even a small segment of the banking industry that does more than just insert itself and charge a toll!

nerdponx 3y ago
Of course they do. Toyota inserts itself between me and my need to go places.
- pixl97 3y ago
  In this case transportation grift is a trillion dollar problem in the US, but maybe slightly different than you're saying. A huge portion of US infrastructure is built on the idea that no one in their right mind would walk to it. Our shops are box islands in multi acre oceans of black asphalt. Vast arteries of concrete separate people from where they live to where they buy. So, yea I would say there is plenty of grift at different levels.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    I think we have a different interpretation of "between". I just meant that they see a costly thing that people do, and they do something to reduce that cost. That basically is what all companies do. I believe that's what GP meant as well, but apparently everyone else interpreted it differently.
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > A huge portion of US infrastructure is built on the idea that no one in their right mind would walk to it. No one in their right mind would want to walk to any business in the US due to its urban planning and transport infrastructure. Even biking is an absurd risk that only rare people dare to make. In the US it's not abnormal to express the length of even mundane car trips in how many hours you spend driving. That's definitely not a halmark of a walkable region.

book1976 3y ago

> to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every business works. Sure this might be true. Also true that changing topic every three months is a sure way to ruin your reputation

morelisp 3y ago
At least one SV luminary founded his empire on the idea you could "become an expert" on any topic in four weeks and shift between them constantly. Even after explaining the grift his star is still fairly bright.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  But, in all fairness, SV loves and celebrates grifters.

SergeAx 3y ago

No. Pretty much every business works like this: you BUILD something people (will) want and sell it to them. Even if you are a retailer, you still build a shop from shelves, showcases, cashier desks and so on and you build a logistic system to supply it with goods.

JohnFen 3y ago

> to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every business works. That's how bad businesses work. Good businesses provide a solution to a real problem, instead.

fnovd 3y ago
I'm not sure what your nitpick is supposed to be getting at. Good businesses create a solution to your problem and then "insert themselves" between you and that solution. That's how they make money. If they could not stand in the middle and charge you for access, there would be no incentive to create the solution.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I don't think I was nitpicking at all. "inserting themselves between" two things is very, very different than providing a solution to a problem. > Good businesses create a solution to your problem and then "insert themselves" between you and that solution. I cannot wrap my head around this framing at all. Businesses that provide a solution aren't inserting themselves between anything. They're offering a solution directly.
  - fnovd 3y ago
    Think about any software company with a large sales team. The people writing the software are not the people selling the software. Writing software and offering it to people does not sustain a business. Creating IP and then finding creative ways to charge people for it does. The sales team that "inserts themselves between" your problem and the solution the product team has created is a core part of the business, a sine qua non.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      The sales team and the dev team are both a part of the same team.
    - 3y ago

Aurornis 3y ago

> to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every business works. I disagree. They’re not the same thing. Most businesses will provide solutions to a need, or at least facilitate getting you to the solution for a fee. The social media grifters are doing something else. They’re finding people with a need (or tricking people into thinking they have a need) and then trying to capture that person as a follower and, eventually, a revenue stream while delivering little real value in exchange. The prototypical social media grifter like this has a lot to say and a lot of strongly worded opinions, but the end game usually involves something like hiding the “real” answers inside of a paid course or paid community. They spend years building a following on social media and then suddenly they’re selling a course for $1000 per seat. They only need a few hundred of their million followers to convert to make a decent amount of money. The content is usually so-so or recycled from other books and courses. Often purchasers are so embarrassed about having paid $1000 for it that they won’t complain online. If they do complain, they get dunked on by other social media users who were smart enough to see the grift, so they delete their complaints. I’ve followed many people on Twitter who started out doing good work on indie projects or small startups, built up a following, and then pivoted into selling courses and educational material to their followers. An alternative grift is to build up a following and then carefully walk the line on “offering the opportunity” to invest in their newest business. A handful of their star-struck followers will be knocking down their door to hand over their cash. You see it a lot with real estate and self storage business influencers.

Zenquin 3y ago

"that churn out history and economics videos" Can you provide some examples?

JeremyNT 3y ago

I feel like this isn't a new phenomenon, it's just been democratized. As with Jeff Kramer and other business talking heads who will gladly tell you how you can make money by just following their advice, if somebody really had the secrets to "get rich quick" they wouldn't go around selling that to you. In the age of "web3" (and now AI) hype, there's no longer one Jeff Kramer - there are thousands, millions of them, inserting themselves in peoples' feeds instead of into their TVs. Now countless grifters are out there, selling themselves as arcane wizards who can lead the gullible masses to financial success. Unlike Kramer (who is bound by a legal framework that at least tries to protect public from outright grifts in traditional media), though, this new generation is basically free to outright lie with complete impunity.

rewmie 3y ago

> to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every business works. This might be the rentiers scheme, but that's hardly how any economy works. A bakery hardly inserts itself between the very bread it makes and the client who wants to buy it. Even logistics companies, the epitome of a middleman, delivers critical value. > social media made it possible for anyone(?) to gain a following and so put themselves as a kind of authoritative middle man and act as a conduit for advertisers between people and thing they want I don't think this is true. Marketing is not a middleman. Raising awareness of a product and/or service is not the same thing as making impossible deals possible. Likewise, newspapers from a couple of decades ago were not middlemen in any of the adverts they printed, or is YouTube a middleman in any of the adverts it shoves between videos.