An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy
behindthequest.com
behindthequest.com
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.
Next comes the growth phase, where more people get involved, and start competing for attention/clicks/votes/whatever points system.
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.
Next comes the crossover, where the exploit knowledge becomes public, and everyone now must do it because everyone else is.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe society needs to change.
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.
The next time you decide on a particular brand of product, or vote for a particular politician, ask yourself: why do I think this? Why do I have these beliefs about how the world works, about how society should be organized, or about why people should act this way?
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.
A platform has hundreds of millions of users. Some do anything necessary to capture as big a slice of that audience, and monetize it.
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.
Note that I distinguish marketing from mere ads, which (one hopes) are just trying to impart information. I have no problem with you saying you have skateboard for sale at $50. When you pay a 19yr old model to stand there looking cool with a sultry look on her face, thats not advertising, its manipulation. Sure it works, its even legal, but it's a very evil thing.
https://youtu.be/_86qb7hlbJI says it all (only 50 second long and very funny, be sure to check out his other stuff - comedy is usually greatest when its saying something true).
Gimmicks are only needed if you can't figure out what people need or can't deliver it.
Bringing this up because Silicon Valley would be building much better products if our venture-funded companies hired marketers - not marketers who work on advertisements, social media, etc, I know we hire plenty of those - But the kind of marketers who rigorously research consumer needs and creatively find ways the technical capacity of companies can be deployed to meet those needs. User testing is only a small subset of market research, and it's sloppy, lazy, and ultimately very shortsighted to limit market research to user testing and data mining.
I think this is overgeneralized and the effect that people agree on a set of believes/values/rules isn't a good indicator of the presence of free will. There might be other mechanisms involved.
The latter is some sort of humanism, that ultimately resulted in all the things we collectively seem to value about western societies, while the former is more or less responsible for the biggest problems we have.
So even if free will turns out a complete illusion, it would still matter how people treat each other based on that idea. Usually you can amend it to: “Free will is an illusion, at least for those poor idiots who have nobody but themselves to blame for it, which is why it is socially acceptable for me to exploit them”
(This is not aimed at you, it is just a thought that crossed my mind, when I read your comment)
* or do you exploit others with it until you're financially comfortable and morally uncomfortable, at which point you pivot, mea culpa, and educate...
I flipped open at random the other day the book 'Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion' and was a bit disturbed by what I read. It was about a particular way of starting a conversation in order to manipulate someone into then finding it difficult to resist your next conversational gambit, with the obvious end goal of parting them from their money against their better judgement or similar. I want to get rich one day and get out, but is this what I need to become to do it?!
Marketing is poison, and the sooner a person learns to ignore it and do their own thing instead, the happier they'll be.
It also sounds like the Postmodernist Disease of the Science Wars assuming nothing is real while they write bullshit indistinguishable from a Markov Chain generator output.
The prevalence just shows that - not that it isn't pathological.
1. You're putting a lot of very different things in the same bag. Marketing is not advertising, and all advertising is not unethical.
2. I don't know where you work, but I'm willing to bet you're making a living because advertisers are pushing a product or service you build/direct.
If you're going to make this kind of blanket statement, you should at least follow its implications all the way to the endpoint.
Hard to disagree with that, but this is very different from the parent poster's claim.
This stuff, buying clicks, lobbying platforms to ban content you don't want to be associated with your product/service because it could distort its "cleanness".
Advertising is needed but there are a lot of valid reasons people don't like them very much.
There are bad marketers as there are bad programmers, bad lawyers and bad physicians, but we don't jump to 'all programming is bad'.
Let me guess, Bill Hicks, right? Anyway, this is a straw man of what marketing actually is.
Marketing is the process of finding out what a customer wants and finding the most efficient way to deliver it. What you've described is advertising.
Marketing at its best is helping people see how a product fills a need or makes their life better in a way that might not have been clear at first.
Yeah, it's crazy, but there is something noble about letting people know that there is good stuff that can help them in ways that they can't imagine yet. It's doubly good if that helps you run a business that makes a truly useful product.
I don't know anything about Hunky Bill (I just noticed he lived in Vancouver! WTH... Can I really trust him?) But that perogie maker. Yep. Good as gold.
Also, lol @ commenting on Hacker News to rail against marketing. This is literally a lead-gen site for YC
Just as an illustration, if you watched the show Silicon Valley, this was one of their big challenges. We made something brilliant, but hardly anyone understands why it matters.
What you call help is not what I would call help - using a wealth of scientific literature to design information that when conveyed can optimally take advantage of statistically likely emotional or physiological triggers to exploit people into buying something they didn't already want is evil.
Marketing as a concept could make some sense in information scarce environments like the era before global instant communication between anyone anywhere to any number of people. Since then, absolutely nobody has asked the question "I don't know what to spend my money on, I sure wish a corporation would suggest something".
Cynicism is easy, but the truth is that there are useful, helpful things out there, and that making people aware of this is not intrinsically wrong.
Is this the "decentralized internet" product, or the initial Pied Piper product? SV the show is very accurate in some ways, but how did it take them until Season 2 to discover that average consumers don't give a crap about a hard-to-use, seemingly B2B-focused app that compresses their pictures?
No it isn't. It's just a shame that 99.99% of the industry are ruining it for the rest of them.
Advertising a new product or service is great, but showing me the ads over and over again is manipulation. Creating a brand to get people emotionally invested is manipulation. Almost the entire industry is manipulating people to buy something they didn't want, spend more than they should have (including the costs that marketing adds to the product) or trying to convince them to buy from you instead of someone else.
Everything in the exploitation economy is evil. But then most previous attempts at large-scale human organisation have been evil too, in their own ways.
It's possible to have a humane non-exploitation economy, and it might even be possible for it to include some marketing. But it would look very different to the economy we have today.
For the record, this is not what marketing professionals do. What you are talking about is somewhere between black-hat advertising and lifestyle advertising (which is much deeper than "manipulation").
I personally like 'tptacek's definition of marketing (at least within the tech area he was in at the time):
> Marketing is product definition, awareness, lead gen, conversion, and then the measurement and improvement of same.
From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024678
That definition describes the field much more reasonably.
"The ads portrayed Mac as a young, hip, laid back guy in a hoodie, whereas PC was a stodgy, befuddled, error-prone, middle-aged nerd... not surprisingly, adroit and modern Mac always got the best of outdated and inflexible PC ... The campaign produced results... less than 2 years later its [market] share had doubled... the cool campaign also helped boost customer value perception... Good advertising wasn't the only thing contributing to Apple's success..."
That campaign clearly had nothing to do with 'creating customer value'. It was a smear campaign. Yet in the same textbook these marketing academics praise it as great advertising. There is a laughably tiny section on ethics (2 paragraphs) at the end of the chapter which simply has open-ended questions, no guided discussion or anything.
It should surprise no-one that marketers have a fantastic bullshit story to convince people marketing is some kind of force for good. It is after all their job. Most amusingly I think they have largely pulled the same trick on themselves.
(1) - https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Marketing-14th-Philip-Kotl...
Marketing professionals absolutely use manipulative predatory tactics like that on the people they are trying to convince to buy their products. Just because you nonsensically try to suggest otherwise, doesn't magically make it so.
What's even less shocking is that it has real limitations in that, once trust is lost by a bad actor in one area of marketing, all other areas are suddenly seen as untrustworthy as well. That is the reason marketing only tends to work on younger people with little to no previous experience being targeted for the hard sell.
You can't distance yourself from people who use predatory advertising as a means to increase the "awarenes" metric any more than you can claim marketing isn't actually selling anything.....
Don't forget the first step - research. Which involves either boots on the ground, offline, watching, talking to and interacting with people, or paying someone else to do it.
> How is the "influencer game" different from ads?
Big difference -> ads are specifically marked as advertisements as legally required. The legislation is wildly inconsistent for influencers (#ad etc)
Just because they take place here doesnt mean everyone here is involved in these discussions.
Thank god! I think we got lucky there...
I agree with influencers making a difference and we see something analogous to buying clicks here. This will distort perception further. Fringe topics will suddenly seem to be important to lot of (fake) people. This will distort perception heavily.
Oh you thought it was a coincidence that every desk in MI5 has a Curvoiser bottle always pointing at the camera? Or that Black Panther chases a Mercedes not a Maseratti?
No such thing as a brand shown by accident.
Simplified version.
Type 1: Think that metrics (followers, friends, likes, reposts...) have meaning. Pursue that meaning. Have no effective moral structure. Maybe are dumb.
Type 2: Don't care about metrics. Find a way to get something that they actually like out of the systems. Have some moral structure.
Much discussion assumes that all users are dominated by their Type 1 side. Type 2's are invisible to the analyst.
Me I say. If everybody is genuinely Type 1 it's time to can "Project Mankind" and start again. Fortunately I know that there are Type 2's out there.
What a miserable feeling, chasing numbers, producing and contributing nothing real to humanity.
I bet it is better for happiness and mental health to stay away from all that.
Yeah. This isn't exclusive to social media influencers, though.
Are not most modern jobs like this?
You just described 80% of financial services...
The question is more why so many people decide to follow those shallow meaningless things...
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").
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.
I get the rage in TFA's article, but all I feel is pity.
Gosh, imagine how that traveling looks like, documenting every moment of it, creating all these fake, yet real looking spontaneous stories. I doubt that one can actually enjoy traveling like that, but maybe that's just me.
I feel sorry for these people.
Turn around, see a posse of people around a guy pointing a serious camera at his face. I immediately felt bad for him, it felt so unnatural and the realization that this "vacation" was a job for him did not make me envious at all.
My wife and I instead found a bar inhabited by the local service workers and had a great time hearing their stories.
One could say that, almost by definition, the individual with the most ability to game the system has the highest merit.
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'.
We are speaking here about some pictures on a small, rectangular screen held in the hand.
In poker, reading tells is an accepted part of the game and within the rules. It's my understanding that most of the tactics reported in the article are against Instagram's rules.
My impression is that who’s interested in this sort of service is something like small start up fashion brands that can’t afford an actual celebrity.
My brother makes independent video games, at one point he was approached by someone who offered to broker deal with Twitch streamers to promote one of his games.
How real the popularity of these streamers really was, effects whether this might have been a good idea or not.
Whether that evokes your sympathy or not, I guess the moral of the story, of you’re in the market for purchasing influencer services, buyer beware
I would advise treating unaffiliated middlemen as scammers like those offering jobs for money. (If there is some affiliated group of streamers and they handle communications that is fine.) If you want cheap marketing releasing some free copies generate no to marginal expenses.
It is respectful to all involved - you are giving away a few potential sales in exchange for a potential larger market, they can give it a fair shake and let people know what they think.
The viral effect can be real but it seems to depend on its own merits even if the "merit" is a gimmick like being hillariously glitchy.
You seem to be arguing that there is no such thing as cheating unless you get caught.
This is interesting if true
On the other hand, this seems like a way to legitimately take your instagram career to the next level! Networking is about who you know, not about how many people you know. Knowing a Facebook verification contractor is some pretty ironclad social proof.
That said, there's no guarantee that the contractor will be assigned your application to review. Assuming there are bribes, it likely would involve multiple people which increases it's chances of being revealed and less likely to actually be happening.
I wonder if it's just an employee filling in a form with their name on it or just some Dev flipping a bool on the backend though. If the former, it does sound risky if Facebook ever gets tired of the corruption and starts investigating.
But other people are more "authentically" doing paid product placement, still without necessarily disclosing that to those they "influence"?
I am unimpressed.
It sounds like they're saying that only some people truly have earned the right to get rich scamming the rubes.
If all you look at are follower counts and then throw your money at them, you're just bad at your job.
I find myself doing this often, due to all the podcast ads I hear! If I'm going to buy a mattress or printed framed picture I'm going to start with I've heard about from some "influencer" I follow.
Most advertising isn't designed to force you to buy, that's not how people behave. Ads are about establishing name recognition first, then nudging you one small step at a time towards a purchase.
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.
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.
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.
The reason so many people go so hard on the Instagram game isn't just to make themselves feel good or validated, it's because when you have 400,000 people watching your stories every day a lot of people will pay you to wear their gear while you do it.
I think that depends on what you count as important. It's pretty safe to assume that this sort of thing happens in every social media where people can monetize. Social media requires a certain amount of social trust to thrive, so if the health of social media generally is important to to you, this matters even if you don't use Instagram specifically.
Personally, this sort of thing is one of the (but certainly not the biggest) reasons why I avoid all social media like the plague.
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 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.
The influencer culture is weird, and I would feel weird making so much money essentially being an ad-person.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Ok then.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why wouldn't they? Are they counting this manufactured engagement in the figures they use to sell advertisements?
At most this is a conversation about how IG is enabling bad behaviour, but it's not quite end of the world territory.
It is immaterial if the interutero cannibal shark that wins because it developed first and the consummed would have been stronger it is still the sole survivor.
Actual aristocrats were better at fighting as they could afford the diet, equipment, and to train from birth essentially. They had advantages but martial abilities still ultimately provided the limit. No money or royal blood could save chevaliers from changes like establishment of pike formations, or armor piercing crossbows on the battlefield, let alone guns no matter how much they cried foul about honor.
Ultimately they were part of a high value specialist-low value generalist cycle like how professional weavers did better than just any peasant in a cottage but worse than factories designed by more educated engineers but staffed with unskilled factory workers who in turn may be displaced by increased automation or cheaper labor elsewhere.
So their surviving descendants "administratized" and had others do the fighting more while they ruled through other means.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/liars-tale-a-history-of-false...
Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man : His Masquerade
https://www.worldcat.org/title/confidence-man-his-masquerade...
The role of easy travel (Mississippi steamboat in Melville's tale), or communications (mail, newspapers, telegraph, telephone, Intenet, ...), is also notable.
The Greek god Hermes (Mercury) represented travel, messengers, and tricksters. I find this interesting.
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.
But the first step in all these cases is to admit that influence works. 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.
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.
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.
If you could give perfect attribution of influence on outcomes you should probably be a world changing billionaire already.
Anything which affects speech affects free speech "corruption" had nothing to do with it. The goal of speech is to spread a message which is a form of influence!
Defamation laws can still affect free speech and can and have been abused to stifle truth and criticism. It is dangerously naive to think that one can just restrict "influencing" and not cause harm. Point out the mayor id taking bribes? Jail for trying to influence elections and operation of the state.
Even most radically you could stop renumiation sure but that doesn't mean influence would be stopped and would only give rise to networks of "not paid for influencing" influencers.
Similarly because social media platforms have the analytics to detect advertising masquerading as influencers, this type of unregulated advertising could be brought under regulation by requiring social media platforms to report it.
HN has almost nothing in common with Instagram and Facebook.
I also use IRC whenever I have some question or need help with something and it's great. I never feel my time spent on IRC is a waste, but my usage of it is quite focused and I don't hang out in rooms compulsively like I do on HN.
other than that, I welcome our new startup investiment sentiment data harvesting overlords.
They own the beach, and you are a single grain of sand screaming for attention among all the other grains of sand.
And as someone constantly betrayed by my Android soft-keyboard, I've considerable sympathy.
Your being facetious, right?
Uh, did you intend to misspell that, just to drive home the point? Or did you actually make a grammatical mistake, while calling out another poster's grammatical mistake, who was him- or her- self calling out yet a third person's grammatical mistakes?
Edit: To a degree, yes. Infomercials were wildly successful. But were there other ways?
Maybe add a bad Photoshop image if you're feeling creative.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/liars-tale-a-history-of-false...
Bullshit, cheat. Cheat blatantly. If there's a broken obvious but unintended way to accomplish your goal do it.
Otherwise one of the other billions of meatsacks roaming around the planet will do it first. Then they'll be eating your lunch.
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!