This is basically a repeat of SEO.<p>At first, you have the early adopters. Things grow organically and it doesn't feel like a zero-sum game because there aren't many players.<p>Next comes the growth phase, where more people get involved, and start competing for attention/clicks/votes/whatever points system.<p>Next comes the exploiters, who discover weaknesses in the system and take advantage of them. They tend to make a lot of money because there's not much competition in this niche.<p>Next comes the crossover, where the exploit knowledge becomes public, and everyone now must do it because everyone else is.<p>Next comes the shutout, where the company running things starts actively punishing bad actors, but by this time, being a bad actor is essential to survival, so people do it anyway. It becomes a game of cat-and-mouse, new exploits, new mitigations.<p>Eventually, the company manages to fix their algorithms enough that the exploits don't offer decent marginal returns anymore, and it returns to what the company originally intended: 1% of people are successful, 99% of people make next to nothing, and the company makes shitloads.<p>And then the new big thing comes out. The old system goes into decline and the new system starts to take over. Rinse and repeat.
Apologies if this is too meta, but all the claims of "ugh so glad I don't care about social media" and "what do influencers am I right????" feel really, really disingenuous on a forum run by a silicon valley incubator, where discussions of building products that run on advertisements regularly take place.<p>I think there's a deeper truth that most people, including us here on HN, don't want to admit: humans are at not rational, logical beings; rather we are emotional decision makers who largely don't understand our own opinions and preferences, where they come from, or how much "influence" comes from sources outside ourselves.<p>The next time you decide on a particular brand of product, or vote for a particular politician, ask yourself: <i>why</i> do I think this? Why do I have <i>these</i> beliefs about how the world works, about how society should be organized, or about why people should act <i>this</i> way?<p>At this point it's almost a truism to say ads work. How is the "influencer game" different from ads? A trusted source shows a product or service, and some percentage of the followers buy it.<p>A platform has hundreds of millions of users. Some do anything necessary to capture as big a slice of that audience, and monetize it.<p>This may be a revelation for Joe Average who knows nothing of the ad-driven-startup world, but it shouldn't be a surprise to us.
Man, reading this makes me so happy I don't care about social media, and I have other aspirations than trying to be a social media influencer.<p>What a miserable feeling, chasing numbers, producing and contributing nothing real to humanity.<p>I bet it is better for happiness and mental health to stay away from all that.
I'm currently doing the Digital Nomad thing, wandering around the world building a product.<p>So many "influencers" out there. Usually not only "growing their audience", but now running courses on "how to live your dream by becoming an Instagram Influencer while travelling". The industry appears to be eating itself (this is also true of the nomad thing, too - so many "coaches" and "mentors" out there who will teach you how to achieve the "nomad lifestyle").<p>I'm in the lucky position of being able to code for decent money while travelling, so I get to watch them hustle their arses off trying to make it work. I would not want to be in their position. The market is declining, the competitors are increasing, and the option of going home and getting a "normal" job again feels like total failure.<p>I get the rage in TFA's article, but all I feel is pity.
See also "How I Eat for Free in NYC Using Python, Automation, AI, and Instagram"[0] for an indication as to how "easy" it is to write an algorithmic social media "influencer" with 25K followers.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19554425" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19554425</a>
The use of the term "merit" in this context feels fraught with issue.<p>One could say that, almost by definition, the individual with the most ability to game the system has the highest merit.<p>If a poker player is able to read the opponents' faces where no-one else can - they win based on merit. The losers may well disclaim this as being some sort of 'hack'.<p>We are speaking here about some pictures on a small, rectangular screen held in the hand.
> This is how it works: someone working at facebook is taking bribes in exchange for the blue mark, a middle man will take your money (anywhere between $1000 and $15000 dollars, depending on your stupidity) and the friend at fb will submit an application for you to be verified. Hopefully it will be approved.<p>This is interesting if true
The OP is suggesting that some "influencers" who get paid to say/show they like something on instagram are "fake" because... they mislead the people who pay them about how many 'followers' they have?<p>But other people are more "authentically" doing paid product placement, still without necessarily disclosing that to those they "influence"?<p>I am unimpressed.<p>It sounds like they're saying that only some people truly have <i>earned</i> the right to get rich scamming the rubes.
As a nine-year old, I watched commercials on our black and white TV showing famous baseball players claiming they "smoked Camels." I knew then that smoking was dangerous, and that it was unlikely that the players "smoked Camels," either. So I don't get this influencer crap. I mean I really do not get it.
Sounds like it can take a lot of money and effort to become a winner at the game of Instagram. The system has rules; you have to know them and play them in order to win. Other players know the rules too, and you know that they know that, so fun second order effects exist. I can see why it could be fun, competing with other players. Trying to keep up with whatever kind of picture (and legend behind it, I expect) scores highly, but presumably knowing that the only way to break ahead of the pack would be to take a risk on something a little bit different and win with it. Gambles and game theory and so on.<p>Instagram isn't something that "matters", though. Is it? Does it matter how this game is played and how the winners are picked? Surely the only ethical issue is people playing who don't realise what the rules are; people who think they're playing a different game based on this "organic" growth the article discusses, so is the answer just to make sure that everyone who plays knows that's not the game anymore? The game has changed; we might as well get angry that Starcraft bouts today bear little resemblance to the slow fumblings that were seen during the first weekend on Battle.Net after Starcraft's release in 1998.<p>Do the players need to pretend that the game is still the organic game? Maybe that's part of it; there's an audience of judges who aren't playing but give points for "authenticity", I expect. But ultimately, this is a meaningless game some people like to play; the only harm (apart from people getting so into playing the game that they take it too seriously and damage their lives, but that's true of every game) I can see comes when people think they're playing a different game, but we just need to make the game clear up front.<p>I am way out of touch. The last online game I played with any dedication was probably Counterstrike, back when it was an 8MB alpha mod for HL (I think I've still got that executable on a CD somewhere, if it hasn't flaked with time). I never did Myspace or Facebook or any of the others, but Instagram just seems like a sharper distillation of the games that they became.
It's a older problem than Instagram.<p>One reason why people don't trust experts is that they see fake experts like Cokie Roberts and Jim Cramer on TV all day.
I think you could look at the value of an influencer as providing an aesthetic, much like an artist, but the kicker is that the influencer is driving ads and is part of a consumerist architecture. While true art is nourishing, influencing is about depriving someone of contentment by making them want something they don't have.<p>I also think when we see people who are paid a lot, we want to like them, and feel as though they are contributing proportional to their pay. We want to know that they're working hard, and making a difference on society, not just for themselves, in a positive way.<p>The influencer culture is weird, and I would feel weird making so much money essentially being an ad-person.
It's also the same with open source work. You need social connections to big influencers or successful startups in order for your project to get popular. The main channel seems to be Twitter; that's where open source projects tend to be shared and a lot.<p>I barely use my Twitter account so I was very lucky that one of my projects became popular (over 5K stars on GitHub now). It's a general purpose back end framework.<p>The only hype that my project got was that it appeared on the front page of HN a couple. of times at the beginning (this was a few years ago).<p>Because my project grew organically (and mosly linearly) without much social hype, most users tend to be small independent developers who use it for side projects. Also it's now being used by 2 of the top 100 cryptocurrencies (by market cap). Cryptocurrencies tend to generate their own network effects.
Why do we call them influencers? Why not rat catchers or pied pipers or something. Because it feels like this story is going to end, the same way the one in Hamelin did.
All these products have a beginning, a middle and an end.
As more and more people clamber on board the whole thing becomes top heavy and collapses under its own weight. Hard to imagine how invasive and fake future mass platforms will be like though...
The house always wins despite running a 'free' platform for people to load their content into...
What I kind of like about it is that those fake influencers burn money of advertisers without producing results by forcing ads on real people. At least in the short run this means less ads for the people which is a really good thing so I support it.
I mean... weren't influencers always fake? It is in their name - they exists to influence people towards some specific outcome. For some - it is equivalent to ads, for others it is political agenda.<p>Some might even believe in what the say and do, but first and foremost they are platform to deliver an idea. There is nothing real required from them, just an illusion of it.
The social media platforms benefit out of this situation.<p>What surprises me is how similar the recommendations are when I borrow someone else's computer in a different geographical location to do some testing or want to use YouTube to look up how to do something. In these scenarios I am on a different operating system, differently gendered to normal, possibly in a borrowed account or in incognito mode. Yet I get the same lowest common denominator stuff that I get at home, logged in and with a particular history. I come away wondering how tailored those recommendations actually are.<p>Of course they are not that tailored at all. Unless I specifically look for something whatever get recommended is going to be from a quite narrow selection. If I start out looking for a particular topic then the recommended stuff will steer me back to the same froth that everyone else gets.<p>If I was a paranoid person I would assume that the social media giants were especially good at tracking me. But no, I have been tricked into believing recommendations are more tailored than they actually are.<p>So why does this suit the social media companies? Well Google/Youtube is probably the case in point. Shifting those videos around costs bandwidth. They have had boxes in the telcos before now, they might as well be a virtual update to Blockbusters and only have the general small selection and not every single option, that will do for most people most of the time. Or like libraries in the olden days where you could put in a special order for any book to borrow but the local library just had a few hundred kiddies books, a few hundred books in big print for the old folks and a few reference works.<p>There was a story on here today about how Google search results are skimping on showing us everything. I actually had not been able to find a former co-worker recently, and, thanks to the article comments I went on DDG and was able to find him.<p>So we have a subset of information going on, the same influencers, the same search results, the same videos, this also becomes a corpus of information we rely on and, the more we rely on it, anything outside of the expected becomes alien and rejected by us. It is like eating the same food every day, variety that was once the spice of life doesn't sit well.<p>Special knowledge is always special knowledge though. The really good stuff has few if any likes/views/reads. It is there for people who take the path required to get there. It matters not what the medium is.
What's interesting is that Facebook could easily clamp down on this: they certainly have the tools to monitor their network for "fake" accounts and identify activity by pools.<p>Why wouldn't they? Are they counting this manufactured engagement in the figures they use to sell advertisements?
Scams, conmen and pretenders. None of this is new and certainly doesn't mean the death of meritocracy.<p>At most this is a conversation about how IG is enabling bad behaviour, but it's not quite end of the world territory.
Influence works. If it didn't, nobody would practice it.<p>Some forms of influence are clearly illegal. But there are vast gray areas, like pharma sales, where doctors are offered speaking fees to "speak" to an empty room near a nice beach. I would throw both the doctor and the pill pusher into a dark hole and throw away the key and that would save our society tens, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars and many lives.<p>But the first step in all these cases is to admit that <i>influence works.</i> Stop putting the onus on the consumer, least of all when the whole "market" leading up to the consumer is also compromised by influence. Stop claiming that influence is "free speech." It isn't. It's the corruption of free speech. Stop claiming that laws against influence are unenforceable. If influence could not be identified, it could not be remunerated.<p>While it's often a good idea to imagine a world with fewer laws and rules, or systems that are self-correcting, the other approach needs consideration, too. Influence could be regulated, taxed, and circumscribed more tightly, with more kinds of influence prohibited by law.<p>Bad influencing won't go away if you ignore it. That's just poisonous smugness. Influence isn't "just how things are." There's lots of influence that is already illegal. Choose to do something, or, unless you are a hermit, things will get worse.
Maybe I'm super dumb but how much value could an online avatar possibly have if the mere prevalence of spam causes one's "followers" to lose their focus and meander away?
This Instagram influencers thing is really a separate universe of cheats and tricks. Take those wannabe influencers, who are "promoting" some exclusive brand for free without brand owner knowledge only to make an impression that this brand paid them, which means that they are such influential influencers. Apparently they hope that some other brand owner will look and say "Wow, this guy was hired by, say, Nike, for a promo, we had to hire her or him as well too". Crazy times.
Good article. I like that it's been written in the frantic style of someone who's just discovered the dark patterns inherent in the Internet sharecropping industry. Hopefully some of the aspiring Youtuber/IG people read this and understand that the market for influencers is way past the saturation point.<p>They own the beach, and you are a single grain of sand screaming for attention among all the other grains of sand.
This guy keeps going on about how 'you should get everything through hard work and effort.'<p>Bullshit, cheat. Cheat blatantly. If there's a broken obvious but unintended way to accomplish your goal do it.<p>Otherwise one of the other billions of meatsacks roaming around the planet will do it first. Then they'll be eating your lunch.
Can't imagine this is going to be my most popular comment but... the first thing I did was Google for one of the services she's complaining about and give them $35 for one of the things she's complaining about. If it works, I'll pump more money into it.<p>I've spent about $1,200 so far building an Instagram following -- albeit it's quite small. I'm shooting for 5,000 real, engaged followers, and willing to spend $5,000 getting it. I think it will be an asset that will easily throw off more than $5,000 of value for me. We'll see!