Man. When I was 18 I was overweight and already balding. I worked at a gas station. Once a hooker spit on me because I wouldn’t let her steal some ice cream. I cut my foot once on broken glass in the dumpster because part of my job was tamping it down with my feet (it cut through my shoe).
Would I have traded it to be an influencer if I could have? Shit yeah in a heartbeat. But unfortunately for me no one wanted to watch me gyrate. (That’s unfair, some people probably would have).
That said. Now I’m a fully bald old man (I just turned 36). I’m not as overweight anymore though I could prob lose a couple of pounds. Blood pressure is good, though.
Would I want to be an influencer? Jet set around the world and stay in lavish hotels for free? Have companies throw products at me? Have thousands or millions of people knowing my every move? Have to give a shit if there’s a stain on my shirt? Hell no.
I want to sit here on my porch with my dog and my wife and do my work. Then at the end of the day I want to turn it off and set it aside. Maybe we’ll go hiking.
I know it sounds glamorous and maybe it’s appealing to some people. But man it’s not for me.
Trying to cater to consumer whims and maintain relevancy (which is what influencers are doing) is a blurry moving target that multi-million dollar corporate marketing departments can't even consistently hit. The dumpster is practically deterministic by comparison.
Granted the income ceiling without adding skills is much lower but I would rather do a crappy job with trash than do a crappy job with consumers any day (and back when I worked such jobs I made that choice).
I think 34/35 is when I began to notice actual age related differences - relatively small things like not being able to take it for granted that your sore back will be good tomorrow and I'd accrued enough general injuries over time that they were noticeable and compounding - sore/weak knee from a car accident, stiff shoulder from a motorcycle crash, etc.
When you're 35, 35 feels pretty old compared to the personal status quo.
When you're 35 you can pass for 27 if you do what you gotta do.
10 years later is when things grow on your cheeks and forehead (especially if you're pale-skinned) that you can't do anything about short of plastic surgery you totally cannot afford.
I don’t know your specific ailments or their causes but a lot of chronic pain and injuries can be resolved by working out lactic acid and knots with foam rolling, muscle scrapers and tennis balls. Look up on YT how to do these properly from physical therapists. I cured a knee injury that bothered me for over a year in about a week of exercises. Like magic. Same with an elbow injury.
He might not be. 'Getting Old' is largely a mental choice, at least until 75 when your physical capability takes a pretty solid hit regardless of lifestyle choices. I've met people in their mid sixties who are more 'with it' than many teenagers and I've also met people in their twenties who have convinced themselves that their time has passed and there is nothing left to do but work and die.
I'm mentally consigning this fellow to the second camp and hope he is either a troll or really content with his situation.
What I mean by old is that I don’t “get” a lot of the newer fads these days. Particularly around the social space. Instagram, Snapchat, tik-tok and the newer voice based services just seem so intrusive and crazy to me. And snap and tik-tok are almost seizure inducing with the amount of content just screaming at you.
It’s just not -for- me. And I get that. But I don’t get it :)
That and as someone else said I do wake up with the occasional creaky back. And I’m noticing more and more gray in my beard every few weeks :)
Glad to hear you are solid! I've had some friends who got 'old' unrealistically quickly and so I feel the need to push back a bit when I see posts that remind me.
I'm with you regarding the social space though. I don't understand why entertainment appears to consistently trend toward requiring less conscious thought.
The way I see it we've gone from Physical Experience > Word of Mouth / Live Physical Performance > Books / Woodcuts > Newspapers / Pamphlets / Pulp Novels > Radio > Television > Modern Social Media. To be complete, I'd add a branch from Newspapers... > Telegraphy > Telephony > Usenet / BBS > Non-Walled Garden Internet but that is another story and not the mainstream.
The early steps all exhibit ?clear? trade-offs (more reliable information storage and dissemination at the expense of shallower engagement with the information being transferred), but the later stages appear to be reaching the limit of what we can consciously process.
I feel that at some point soon (if not already), the volume of information that can be received will outstrip conscious processing ability. This has a massively negative side effect of limiting human agency which seriously disturbs me.
I don't think the blame is entirely on social media however and because of reasons stated above, suspect the current state of affairs has been brewing at least as long as network television has existed. Possibly into the preceding era of disposable print. Thus, I don't put the problem into a 'kids these days' frame but more of a 'everyone I have known throughout my life' frame.
> According to a poll released in 2019, some 54 percent of Americans between the ages of thirteen and thirty-eight would, if given the chance, become a social-media influencer. A whopping 23 percent believed that this term already fit them.
EDIT: Jesus, this article is the gift that keeps giving:
> Later, when I ask Chase [about the veracity of the video he] explains that the video must be legit because “it’s gotten deleted multiple times off the internet, which is insane.” Epistemologically, this is where we are as a country: when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness.
> when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness.
The difficulty is that it can mean either it's true and the authorities don't want you to know it, or it's false and they don't want you to believe it. Judging information either way based only on it being censored leads to error of two different types. Neither is correct thinking but plenty of people make the opposite mistake of trusting authorities and I think we need both types if we're going to have either. A country full of conformist sheep of any sort would be at risk of some sort of totalitarianism or other political disaster.
> but plenty of people make the opposite mistake of trusting authorities
In almost 40 years, my heuristic of trusting the government and ignoring anything being sold to me as “THEY don’t want you to know this!!” has worked out really well for me.
It might work if your government is trustworthy, but perhaps it's trustworthy because so many people challenge it so openly. Plenty of governments cover up embarrassing parts of their history, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Remember when the US government advised people not to wear masks for Covid and social media sites enforced restricting people from talking about it?
Remember when the US invaded Iraq because they saw a chemical weapons site with some kind of decontamination truck circling the yard?
Remember Edward Snowden showing that some spying that conspiracy theorists had believed turned out to be true?
Remember the Glomar Explorer?
Did you trust everything Trump said in his role as president when it conflicted with public opinion that said he was trying to hide something?
The author is mistakenly adding the 12% and 11% numbers. The real proportion is around 12% of young people. Given that in the poll, "influencer" is used basically synonymously with "celebrity" (Will Smith is considered an influencer) I'd say this is pretty reasonable actually.
>Epistemologically, this is where we are as a country: when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness.
Its funny how oblivious pro-censorship people are to the nature, effects, and history of censorship
The parent obviously means standard in the statistical sense not the bureaucratic sense.
The standard definition is more or less "someone who posts glamorous shots of themselves on social media to build an audience they can influence and then monetize". A non-standard definition would be one which most people would find misleading or not fitting for the term.
I also wonder what the poll looked like, I find it hard to believe people over 30 would want to become influencers unless it was worded something like "Would you like to make millions of dollars if it meant becoming an influencer?"
Don't overthink it. People read this question as, do you want people to give you money because you are popular? And they responded with a resounding, "I guess".
There isn't a "real" standard as per an international organization, but there is already an emergent consensus in marketing around tiers of influencers based on number of followers. For one instance: https://www.tribegroup.co/blog/influencer-followers
"Nano" influencers, according to this particular company, are people with 1000-3000 followers, Micro are 1,000-100,000, Macro are 100,000+, etc. Here's another example with slightly different values: https://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/social-media-influ...
Because this is now big business, I'd expect convergence on a common definition some time relatively soon.
It’s too simple to classify social media count at such small numbers in nano and too wide of an amount in micro.
Different social media apps and then non social media like blogs or podcasts all have different thresholds for what is considered “big”.
With smaller counts, usually if someone is following 4K and is followed by 3K, they aren’t any more “influential” than an active liked person with a couple hundred followers.
Still not perfect but looking at basic interaction metrics will help a lot more as well: likes/favs/bookmarks, reposts, replies/comments. There are overlapping metrics like embedded or referenced count outside the social media app itself. Add in trajectory, history especially to verify this isn’t a BS blip of bought interactions and followers.
Further than that, getting a general view of the cohort of followers like how many are active, how many have profile pics, how many are bots or only on to market their own stuff, etc
Don't know, but putting numerical values on follower count is not likely to be that useful cross-platform due to differences in engagement level, demographics etc.
Agreed. Tik Tok users are worth less on average than other social media. It’s going to be both the social media platform and the niche you are in that affects money to be made. The amount of posting also matters.
This is not including the important and elusive count of true influence. The basic ways are usually like/bookmark, repost, replies/comments. An overlap can also be if your posts get referenced outside the social media network a lot too.
Counting a couple thousand followers as categorization is meaningless since they could be barely interacting to really interacting. And at such a small follower count, low interaction could mean someone with a couple hundred followers is more of an influencer in terms of literal influence than someone with 10x followers.
Probably anyone who has more than a couple thousand followers and made $5 last year from youtube/instagram video profits considers themselves and influencer, and since there is no regulating body of the definition they wouldn't necessarily be wrong.
I used to know a few influencers. I still do. I was part of that culture since I was a photographer and cared about my social media clout. This was 3-4 years ago, when IG used to rule, instead of Tiktok. I don't know if things changed since then.
Most of these influencers looked miserable. It seemed like they were having the best times in various exotic locations. In reality, they were all broke. They barely scratched by staying at the cheapest places, eating cheapest foods, etc. They're stressed out trying to get content and followers
They're fake as well. I took some photos of one influencer in the my studio. She posted the photos few weeks later with the location tagged as Bali, NYC, etc. I thought that was funny.
Another, I mentioned to her that I noticed she's using comment pods due to the way some people commented on her posts. I wasn't accusing her, only stated a fact I noticed. She got embarrassed, denied, and acted like she didn't know what a comment pod was. I pushed it a bit more and she relented she was using pods. Why so fake?
I'm glad I'm out of that world. It adds too much stress in your life to produce content, find followers, and to create world where you seem cool and popular when you're not.
> An engagement pod is a group (or ‘pod’) of Instagram users who band together to help increase engagement on each other’s content. This can be done through likes, comments, or follows.
I would say most people with a lot of comments are using pods already. If you've used pods, you'll immediately know if most of the comments come from pods.
Also, I highly doubt any engagement on social media is genuine. Some people go through random profiles and mass like, comment, follow them hoping for reciprocity. There are bots that do that for your from your account. IG frowns upon that. But some bots have gotten sophisticated enough to randomize their likes/comments/etc to look more human. It's all a big game.
I know of at least one person/group that does that here on HN, or at least did ~3-5 years ago.
Honestly, there's no incentive to stop this type of work. IG wants engagement; comment pods are peak engagement, you've programmed yourself to beat the machine.
My follower count doubled in the few months when I was heavily involved with a photography collective with a pretty sizable following. Obviously being attached to the collective's brand helped, but the organic engagement we had with each other was likely a key contributing factor to my personal account's "organic growth." To do this intentionally with these latent motives strikes me with the same sadness as a distant relative's pyramid scheme sales pitch, or someone pulling the slot arm "just one more time."
I'm a millennial and didn't really have social media growing up. I used Facebook for a little bit in college and then deleted it. It bothered me in my 20s that a lot of social things seemed to be closed to me because I didn't have some form of social media. Even though I had email and text I was somehow treated as if I was asking to be contacted on a fax machine or something like that. It's baffling.
Every time I've even gotten a little bit closer to joining some online community, let alone social media, my anxiety spirals and I have severe mental health symptoms. For my own good and my disinterest I keep off of it for now. Honestly HN is as far as I push those limits!
I can't imagine how this could have been though if social media was a constant throughout my childhood and middle school. It was hard enough dealing with the social fallout in my 20s but I felt like I at least had some degree of choice and control and I feel if I had taken it for granted when I was younger I would have had really severe symptoms growing up probably leading to hospitalization.
Obviously the influencers in that article aren't like me in that regard but I was shocked by the 54% of younger people wanting to make money being an influencer comment, wow! And I do think there's a serious exploitative/mental health factor that's not being addressed here. I wonder how this is going to turn out for those kids later in life. I just can't imagine being under the spotlight and dependent on external validation that much.
> I was shocked by the 54% of younger people wanting to make money being an influencer comment
Honestly, I think it just seems to most like the current 'easy money' route. I'm in the UK - I can remember reading an alarming statistic 15 or so years ago, in the hey day of "Nuts" and "Zoo" magazine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuts_(magazine)), regarding the number of young girls who wanted to be a Page 3/Topless model when they were old enough. Because at that time, they were always in the red top papers, with footballer boyfriends, etc etc.
In 2021 you can be a no one, spend a few weeks on "Love Island" and end up with a million followers on Instagram. Your feed is then full of expensive clothes and shoes (#gifted), and there's an article every week about how "[name] from [show] gets £xx,xxx for a single Instagram post!"
Why bother working in an office, or building a business, or learning a skill or a trade - when 20 minutes a day of revealing photos can make you more money than your parents earn? (See also: OnlyFans)
Ironically, I think (and the article seems to show) the bulk of the really successful influencers are the ones that treat it like a business and actually work hard at it and creating content.
> I wonder how this is going to turn out for those kids later in life. I just can't imagine being under the spotlight and dependent on external validation that much.
It’s not just millennial who deal with this. LinkedIn is becoming inescapable… not to mention any advocacy for a “platform” as part of a resume
There’s always the option of creating an account, giving it an impossible-to-remember password, putting that on your ToDo list with a monthly cadence, and getting 80% of the value with ~2% of the work/stress/distraction. LinkedIn especially is easy to fire up IFF you you have a specific company to research.
That's true, I hadn't thought of LinkedIn. But my experience on there was becoming so ridiculous. Maybe it's more helpful for people who are in other industries but I was getting tons of recruiter spam etc. But yes, it sucks so much when you're expected to be tied to a platform and that's not to mention the serious privacy issues with this.
As an unrelated irony a local meetup.com group focused on Inclusivity now has switched some Facebook video platform...Supposedly you don't have to have a Facebook account but I don't want to give it a try on Linux and all the privacy issues are there :/
Conan O'Brien said 'Fame is the most addictive thing, much more so than heroin, and you wouldn't give heroin to children, would you?' - when talking about kids in the business who grow up destroyed.
For whatever evolutionary reason, we are wired to love attention.
I loathe the notion of social media - but I do play music - and I can attest to the fact that time literally stands still when you have an audience's attention, there is nothing like that.
I think this kind of addiction will be up there with nicotene, barbituates, gambling, anorexia etc..
We probably should be having PSAs in school.
But the issue is more problematic because it's not just a 'habit' - some 'side thing' - it's an 'aspiration'.
Since when did everyone want to grow up just to be famous, and basically contribute nothing? We used to regard that attitude with some skepticism. It's as though Paris Hilton then the Kardashians completely just broke them mould. Kids are really open minded to day, and generally 'good' but the upside down value of 'me me me' vs. at least doing something instrumental for the community (aka anything: doctor, carpenter, teacher, soldier, police, social worker, professor etc.) should have us a little worried. Maybe it's just a phase, or a perspective ... but flipping from communitarian values to brazenly self-oriented values is spooky.
What I try to keep in mind is that for these things to work, you have a few influencers at the top, making money and creating "content" and you have a sea of people who consume the "content".
I deleted all (most) of my social media because I know very well that I'm part of the consumers if I'm on there at all. And if I'm consuming, then I'm not producing. So I try to focus on producing during my day - work (career), personal projects, working out, working on projects around the house, building/investing in my friendships and relationship.
Sure, I also consume sometimes. But I try to minimize it.
I keep on thinking this is like the "washing clothes of goldrush miners in China" story, or maybe the "got rich selling shovels to miners" story: The profit is not in the influencer, its in 2nd order effect consequences, where people predate on the money flow.
Really? These people are in the entertainment business. All those 6pm eyeballs which used to be on free-to-air TV moved, and the advert money followed them down the narrowcasting rabbithole.
Influencer is the 2020s equivalent to the dream job actor/model/dancer.
When I see the level of delusions on these most unwelcome tiktok ads I get, I need a moment to calm down from laughing.
Stay away from social media as much as you can. I have deleted fb, ig and WhatsApp, life was never better.
People get in touch via call or signal, not missing a thing.
What TikTok ads are you referring to? Users often get completely different targeting, but the ads I've seen have been mainstream fast food and then dumb consumer crap like moon lights. Also Old Navy and some car company.
TikTok is really the anti-"influencer" platform. It is a very wide, long tail and doesn't seem to concentrate like many other platforms. People seem to be completely ordinary, versus the delusion that Instagram as an example is pitching, of aspirational perfect living.
Algorithmically TikTok seems to assign very little weight to the creator compared to other venues. Single hits that aren't achieved again are common. Versus say Twitter where if someone has a hit, the platform presumes that every tweet from that person is a brilliant insight.
It is very odd, as I have never installed the app or even googled the term. I have seen some as linked Instagram feeds, but involuntary. Tiktok would be the last thing in the world I care about, I am also quite a bit beyond that age bracket. Usually it's a woman doing a poorly choreographed dance move or two while displaying a duck face.
I am not sure if that is possible but maybe somehow there is an IG/tiktok data exchange if someone has an account on both. This still happens even though I have terminated the ig and fb accounts a while ago
> As to the "age bracket", there is no age bracket for TikTok.
That's possible, but for some reason TikTok keeps showing me 16-year-olds livestreaming themselves talking about nothing interesting. I have no idea why TikTok thinks I'd be interested in seeing that, so I've concluded that that's what the platform has an abundance of.
It took me a while but I've got all social media off my phone. I allow myself 5 minute of twitter in the morning (I use a block to keep me off it otherwise) and 15 minutes of hackernews.
My brain feels radically calmer than it did a few years ago. My parents have Instagram accounts. Why?
Is WhatsApp social media? I use it to talk to my friends. Isn't WhatsApp basically just Signal with less data protection? Does that make iMessage social media?
I think it is in the twilight zone between intrusive app and social media. It is not designed like Instagram, but many people do share quick snapshots/video there.
It does not have a like/dislike feature, but it does go beyond a messaging service I would say.
But would you categorized iMessage and Signal in the same categories then? And if no, why not? Those features, for me at least, are what I would expect out of anything that's not a barebones text message app these days.
I sometimes wonder about the reach of this value system into unexpected or non-obvious ecosystems.
For example, the tech industry has its share of perennial celebrity conference circuit speakers for <insert tech du jour> who grace stages with hundreds to thousands in attendance, Twitter personalities who have loyal followings for their respective thought leadership, and a reinforcing cycle of one feeding the other. Where are the lines between one form of cultivation of celebrity and another? Can anyone really fault these people, given they're reaping rewards from the persona they've created? If it's easier to raise money or get a job as a recognizable personality than it is by way of other acumen or expertise, then it seems like it might well be a shrewd and wise pursuit. If not necessarily a particularly fulfilling one by other measures.
I don't know if value system is quite the right description. Sounds like you are talking about celebrity or popularity in general.
I think the obvious thing that different about most generic "influencers" is that they are not "thought leaders" in any domain, but generally just famous for their personality, looks, or "precoital" posturing.
Hope they have the brains to not burn their income as soon as it hits their bank accounts. This sort of popularity can surely not last more than a few years in almost all instances.
The lifestyle they're put into, of living in huge mansions, eating in fancy restaurants, partying at the hottest nightclubs, virtually guarantees that they'll burn every cent they earn just keeping up appearances, even if most of it is freebies or sponsored.
This happens to celebrities mostly because they have an actual talent and are not necessarily equipped for money/fame (no one is).
Influencers probably don’t have a huge ego. They know what they are and the game they are playing. You don’t often hear about politicians spiraling downward due to their success. They understand the game they play.
In other words, why would a parasite spiral out of control if they deliberately parasitically establish themselves (versus a celebrity who gets there from sheer talent and luck and has no clue what to make of it)?.
Mega church speakers are similar. Nothing about what they do messes with their sleep at night, not an ounce of ‘Is this really who I am?’.
Textbook shamelessness.
————-
The big problem with this is that everyone in their formative years (sub 30) shares at least one dilemma with Patrick Bateman (and Evelyn for that matter):
Evelyn: Get married. Have a wedding.
Bateman: No, I can't take the time off work.
Evelyn: Your father practically owns the company. You can do anything you like, silly.
Bateman: I don't want to talk about it.
Evelyn: Well, you hate that job anyway. Why don't you just quit? You don't have to work.
I'd argue that "traditional" celebrities are much less talented than today's influencers. On the internet, you have to find something that can at least capture someone's attention over everyone else. In the world of celebrities though, you just need to broker enough power to apprear in front of the audience you want.
It's not about brains. The typical mindset of public performers and entertainers (a.k.a. influencers) is they earn money because of who they are. And since their selves usually don't change drastically from year to year, the thinking is the earnings won't change drastically too.
But what about nostalgia? AVGN came back recently and I love it. I also didn't watch for years between. I wonder if it's potentially cyclical over one and done.
I think TikTok is fundamentally changing marketing. If you go on YouTube, you see 1-2 traditional ads. On TikTok all the ads blend in and just appear as another video in your for you page. What I thought was really interesting was that 50% of the user base is over the age of 30.
Because it lets adult men watch young scantily clad boys and girls jump around for free. That’s the sick part to me. These kids (and they are kids) are basically soft core porn for pedophiles. And Nike and Amazon subsidize it.
That's how it started yes, preteens and teens doing dances and lip-syncing to songs. But the kids have already fled to other platforms.
The amount of content produced by people in their 30s and (a lot) over is staggering. You can easily spend hours just scrolling the front page and get stuff you like. And you'll never see any one under 20 unless you specifically go look for that stuff and engage with it.
I do see scantily clad people, but they're mostly in their 30s or 40s. =)
The TokTok algorithm is scary good, it makes Youtube and FB suggestion engines look like someone's high-school project...
That's a pretty broad generalization. I'd argue that since it's a Chinese company, they were more interested in marketing the apps to the entire family, rather than the most profitable or most active users. Traditionally, that's how Asian companies have found long-term success.
This is because it's early and the ads are well designed for the platform, i.e. a lot of ads for flip flops and those 'butt lifting' pants for girls.
Once it opens up you'll see more annoying ads because most products don't fit well. That said, even car companies are making things a little less 'advertisy'.
Ads are already opened up for everyone. I tried to promote a simple post talking for a few seconds. The system seems to auto review and it rejected the ad saying there were exaggerated claims in it.
Reminds me of Calhoun's Mouse Utopia experiments: "Other young mice growing into adulthood exhibited an even different type of behavior. Dr. Calhoun called these individuals “the beautiful ones.” Their time was devoted solely to grooming, eating and sleeping. They never involved themselves with others, engaged in sex, nor would they fight. All appeared [outwardly] as a beautiful exhibit of the species with keen, alert eyes and a healthy, well-kept body. These mice, however, could not cope with unusual stimuli. Though they looked inquisitive, they were in fact, very stupid."
Like many psychology and sociology papers, Mouse Utopia is now discredited because nobody could reproduce those results: https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia
"Kessler 1966 only somewhat resembles Calhoun’s results: while Kessler does describe deviant mice behavior driven by density (such as homosexual matings) and high infant mortality/cannibalism, on the other hand, there are no population crashes or cessation of reproduction but stable populations after initial growth, there are no behavioral sinks, any ‘beautiful ones’ or ‘drinkers’ or ‘autistic’ mice are not described as such by Kessler, the mice are healthy overall, and transplanted mice revert"
Younger audience is more susceptible to aspirational brand messaging - just look at TV ads for youngsters from few decades ago. Old farts are no longer trying to fit in, and in their purchases bring up terms like "lasting value" and "consumer reports".
A friend's son, a newly minted teenager a few years back, had a Logan Paul sweatshirt and T-shirt at the top of the birthday wishlist. Never mind that's it's a generic Old Navy casualware with the Logan Paul logo imprinted on it (and marked up accordingly).
Consumption habits are sticky. It's more effective to get a young person to like your product and they'll buy it across their working life than to try and convert someone already loyal to another brand
Not always true, it can backfire hard. I know zero 30 year olds wearing abercrombie, hollister, or american eagle today, although that was literally the only acceptable brands for them 15 years ago. Abercrombie still sprays that cologne in their stores, reminds you of stepping back into highschool or middleschool.
Realistically I think it's probably targeted at anyone who's willing to [get someone to] spend money on it.
Conspicuous consumption has been a thing for ages, and it's always been about presenting an image as having enough disposable income to be able to buy these sorts of things. The fact that some kids have parents who can afford to lavish this stuff on them only adds to the mystique.
I'd argue that it's also inaccurate to characterize this as just a kids thing. Plenty of people my age and older dump money into brands like Rolex and Mercedes. The main difference I personally see is that the price tags are even higher, and the brands themselves turn over at a slower pace.
It's way older than that. There are ancient Greek philosophers who seemingly devoted their careers to criticizing the phenomenon. I would guess it goes even further back, but, past some point, writing down one's thoughts on the subject wouldn't have been available to anyone who might want to write down their thoughts on the subject.
One of the few named brands in the story is a fried chicken place. You don’t have to be rich to afford fried chicken. But fried chicken is a multi-billion-dollar industry.
And it’s an industry that is deeply dependent on advertising to maintain brand awareness and segment the market. All fried chicken tastes basically the same, so customers choose stores based on brand attributes.
Are you a Popeyes, KFC, or Chick-fil-A kind of person? Influencer marketing helps you figure it out and remember which place is the most desirable for you.
This sort of thing works on many people, but teenagers are especially susceptible to it.
Yes, there’s bad fried chicken and good fried chicken. But when you’re hungry cruising down the commercial strip, there may be two national brands you need to quickly choose from. One of those brands comes out on top because their millions of ad spend got you in there once or twice and now they’re you’re favorite.
Source: we got chick-fil-a curbside many Saturdays last year but at least two other fried chicken places are closer and we generally eat much healthier food.
You don't have to be rich to buy luxury goods. In fact most of them are bought by people who can't afford them but desperately want to own them. There's credit cards, parents, using all your disposable income on them since you don't pay rent, etc.
Right. The people who can actually afford $500 shoes aren't the ones buying Balenciaga sneakers that look like clown shoes. Actual wealthy people are generally not easily influenced suckers.
> Actual wealthy people are generally not easily influenced suckers.
I think you only have to look at the truly high-end luxury market to see that that's not true. A _staggering_ amount is spent on absurd products that only multi-millionaires can afford. And they've very much doing it to one-up the other multi-millionaires.
The likes of watches that cost tens of thousands and cars that cost hundreds of thousands are generally actually-wealthy-person territory, say.
> Actual wealthy people are generally not easily influenced suckers
source? no, seriously. All the marketing I see for luxury products and more generally point to yes, rich people are exactly as suceptible to advertising to poor people, if not more so due to having a greater share of disposable income.
It's the ultimate in product placement. "Someone who looks just like how I want to look is using product X. I need to use my money (or my parent's money) to buy product X so all of the everyone will like me." It's an absolute no brainer for them to do this. It makes more sense to me than targeted advertising from FB/G/etc. These people have subscribers that voluntarily decided to follow them, and are guaranteed eyeballs on anything/everything they post.
Every large corporation has an annual advertising/promotional budget. They hire ad agencies and PR firms to handle that work. These agencies would be the people I'd expect hiring/paying the influencers. I'm sure they have a group of young fresh out of college employees that do nothing but scour the web for influencers keep tabs on their followers, the type of content they produce, etc. When a campaign comes along, they fit the prodcut with the influencer and hope for success.
Non-poor American and European kids certainly have influence over how their parents spend money on them - almost all of them have discretion over which clothes and accessories are bought for them, if not how much money will be spent.
Saturday morning cartoons were invented to sell things to American kids (by way of them begging their parents).
> You’re trying to impress everyone who watches the video, and you want everyone to like it.
This is where the race to the emotional rock bottom starts. What if those influencers become irrelevant in 10 years time and are replaced by another generation?
The key here is to expand to other ventures. The ones who stay on the same platform for years will gradually become irrelevant.
What do you mean 'if'? They're about as disposable as toilet paper. They are created to be disposable and nothing is moderating that impulse at all.
Hell, back in the times of Motown they made the child stars go to school. This is in some ways less organized than, but also less moral than, the music business and the film industry.
And that takes some DOING, to be worse than the music business and the film industry. I think it's the decentralization that does it: platforms that are very algorithmic, distributed, with nobody to claim responsibility for anything.
In the absence of oversight or obvious control we're supposed to see the true nature of what all this stuff becomes when it's free of top-down control.
We are, and it's Lord of the Flies, but for celebrity children. It's not far off child abuse, but with a nice little disconnect between what happens and how the situation's created.
These kids aren't the product, they're the Soylent Green. They're there to die for the algorithm.
Here's the dark truth: any kid like this that gets old enough to have a sense of self-protection around this exploitation is way, way less valuable than a new, younger, fresher one that is completely innocent.
You'll get the occasional one who's bright enough to sock money away secretly (from what little I understand, the rapper Chamillionaire was like this?) and pivot into being one of the exploiters with age and maturity, or just be able to make a graceful exit. The thing is, these kids are meant to LOOK like your classic MC Hammer, acting like lottery winners and living large. To figure out that you have to fake that while secretly being a bit cleverer, and pull it off, is impressively shrewd, and I don't think the system selects for it. The system is not assigning extra points for wise.
I would add that a systemic side-benefit to the group form seen here and in K-Pop is that it's easier to swap out kids and discard them, where in a more isolated celebrity model there's more of an incongruity behind building up a star only to then drop 'em and present a different, younger star to replace them. In a group house it's the house that is the star and it's easier to drop a kid.
This has already happened, you can check the first people who were big on YouTube. Not many of them are still active, but some have actual lasting power. Casey Neistat still pulls 1-2M views for every video, but I think most of his income is outside of producing content for his channel.
This is what I keep thinking about. I feel it’s going to get even darker on the internet when these influencers have to begrudgingly hand the reins over as they get traded in for the newer models.
Hasn’t that been happening for a long time already? We’ve had social media and reality tv for over a decade now and plenty of people have fallen from their pedestal. The truth is that the cycle keeps getting more vapid and depersonalized so these kids will be tossed aside and forgotten very quickly.
Unfortunately not. The premise of that book would be an interesting contemporary article, though: the anxiety of needing to differentiate yourself as an influencer while inevitably being influenced by other influencers.
I think a lot about society and culture -- especially now that we have a young child. I think a lot of the "ills" are just different manifestations of bad parenting.
It's a values thing -- I learned from my parents and grandparents to think futuristically, to get value by creating value, to be suspicious of the free lunch, to not orient my sense of self too much around what others around me are thinking and doing.
This set of thinking prevents me from being interested in being an influencer, which is the same thing that kept me from being sucked into the dot-com boom and bust, from getting excited about crypto, from being sucked into the ebbs and flows of caring about what twitter cares about, etc.
There's a sort of steadiness that comes from your parenting and your values. And in the lack of that, you fall for one thing or another. If it wasn't "influencing," it'd be something else.
To me, the point of the article was that the influencers are just a symptom of a deeper malaise stemming from social media of raising everyone's expectations of themselves, the increased isolation as people spend more time online and have less real friends, and the (flawed) assumption that the average person is a good judge of quality.
All the comments just talking about influencers are missing the point.
They are being 'paid' with useless perks like luxury accommodations, and shoes and clothes.
The 'perks' aren't even a reward, but are the just 'products in use' that the advertisers are using to make money.
In olden days, as exploitative as it was, you'd still have to pay a model to wear your clothes if you wanted to create an ad campaign. Now they'll do it for the 'privilege' of having cool gear.
What a horrible life these kids have. They don't realise it. Their influencing value is inversely proportional to their rise in numbers. If everyone becomes and influencer, who'll they influence. And why does anyone need influencing. It's just advertising by reinvented. Most of it is just showing skin.
FWIW, as a younger person, I have started to see friends (and myself) shift away from influencer culture as it becomes apparent it's unhealthy. When you see so many influencers quit due to mental health, it starts to add up. My perspective is likely skewed by the social groups I tend towards, but the cycle of influencer culture is so short-lived a lot of us do start to catch on.
Wow, the subject influencers in the article were insufferable just to read about. I can't think of any group I have less empathy for than them. The world would be such a better place if the concept of an "influencer" completely ceased to exist.
They're children. Or possibly animals, like show ponies or show poodles. Theirs is not to ask why, or to have a free thought in their head.
If they were being raised to be slaughtered, you might have an easier time finding empathy, even when this raising is not doing great at giving them human qualities. Well, they ARE being raised to be slaughtered, in a slightly more abstract sense. I think empathy is completely reasonable.
The thing is you have to have empathy for what they MIGHT have been if they weren't yanked out of normal life, kept from growing up or seeing any reality, and trained to be incredibly vacant and damaged. You're seeing human beings getting ruined. Maybe they could have been a lot better if they didn't get sucked into this madness.
I kind of had a similar reaction but about the author!
It read like he used an auto-thesaurus, or purposefully chooses more esoteric words simply to up the contrast between how he sees himself - the professor writing smart think pieces whilst going for tenure - versus those dumb vapid teenagers.
The contrast was intentional, but I don't think the author did it to sound superior. The contrast is more that the author is jaded and depressed, but the kids are still innocent and hopeful (for now).
What do you mean by modernity? This is basically an "as seen on tv" marketing channel diluted in forced #relatable / #inspiration content. It's really not new technologically. Just a new way of making you look at sponsored content.
> not being a boring archaic Luddite for a living.
... proceeds to advertise new Nike shoes / holiday destination in a video for a living.
There’s nothing modern about “influencing”. The only difference between influencers and sponsorships/advertisements of olde is that the medium has changed from newspaper/radio/TV to social media websites.
Well this was always going to happen in an attention economy, the worship of fame for fame's sake. Success has shed the burden of actual achievement, vanity has become a job qualification. Why bother being good at sport or dancing or playing guitar, just be famous.
Fine whatever, but it is poison candy for children.
You’re being asked to consider the possibility that your family experiences have influenced this view. Not that you are incorrect, or even correct, the parent statement is simply saying you hold this belief because if you’re experiences.
What beliefs do you have that aren't from experiences? Even analytic beliefs are things you believe because you experienced arriving at them. e.g. I believe 2+2 is 4 because of my experiences with math and calculation, in the same way I believe putting my hand on a hot plate might hurt because of my experience with hot things etc.
>Even analytic beliefs are things you believe because you experienced arriving at them?
What about scientific beliefs? Only a handful of people can really understand (or to align with your phrasing, _experience_ understanding) all the evidence there is to support the Big Bang theory. Yet, a much larger number accepts it.
And lemmas? I'm sure there are some lemmas I just use in proofs but have never proved from the first principles.
You still learn those things, whether lemmas or beliefs about the Big Bang, from experience. You don't necessarily have the experience of deriving these things from first principles or from evidence yourself - someone told you, you read it in a book, etc.
How did you know who or what you could trust? Why do you believe in some books and not others? Again, your experience tells you which are more trustworthy. You have experiences that make you trust textbooks and so you trust the information you get by experiencing reading the textbook.
My point is really that it's absurd to claim someone only believes something because of their experience. Everyone believes everything because of their experiences.
Only on HN would advocating for the importance of family be rabidly downvoted.
Family is a universal component of human civilization. Our current president has repeatedly stated the utmost importance of his family, as has every president.
What makes family bonds so strong is that they won’t turn your back on you when you are in a bind. They are much stronger than friends. Stable households are the most important predictor for childhood success.
You won’t find many who are bitterly opposed to the concept of family except those that are lonely during the holidays.
One of the reasons I'm a HN type is that I'm the type of entrepreneur who will beat himself into the ground to get to my results, no matter what it takes.
Part of the reason for this is that when I was much younger, my family DID turn their back on me, and I became homeless, and I was treated as a black sheep loser all my life and was compelled to reach for other things. I did not have friends for the most part, and my family ties were much worse than that, and I dreaded any connections I had to have.
Made for a lot of free time to work on things that interested me. I was happier during the holidays when I'd got past whatever obligations I even had, those being as minimal as possible.
It didn't make me a good person. It made me a bad person. I've spent years trying to overcome that badness, with some success, despite not getting a lot of reason to bother: I didn't grow up with any sort of positive role models or connections (Dad having rage and guilt issues, and Mom literally being a secret heroin addict). I'd probably be dead if Mom hadn't got clean, then got me clean (we were both so miserable that any change seemed exciting) and started a long slow road towards being less toxic.
You will find damaged people without the importance of family (in a normal sense) among the most significant and influential people in hacker culture, and in SV unicorn culture. These are the people who ride the unicorns, because they aren't normal and aren't good people… just inhumanly driven.
GOOD family makes for good people. Good people aren't always what you look for when you're trying to make the next billion-dollar tech unicorn. Certainly not in leadership.
I’m sorry you experienced this. My home life wasn’t perfect but it was much better than yours. I love my wife and children most of all - they are what I mean by a created family as the family we created was the result of my wife and I choosing to do so. Immense contentment and fulfillment come from my immediate family.
I have found it much better to come to amends with past family I have had issue with than it is to hold grudges and become estranged. I’m not saying your situation is salvageable but that is my experience.
I am also a very driven person and work in tech startups at the executive level. My ability to work long hours and succeed is enhanced by the love of my family rather than fueled by past wrongs.
Yeah, I'm finding it impossible to pull that one off, even after inheriting money: I simply do not have the socialization to get into or maintain a romantic relationship. That's improving but it may never get there and there's nothing I can do about it but be patient and try to improve as a person, in the absence of feedback or reward. Nobody is going to get down into the hole with me and dig me out, I've got to dig myself out and may never get there.
However, this is the same problem I faced as an entrepreneur, so naturally I am doing my best with it. One thing I am, is stubborn :D
> I simply do not have the socialization to get into or maintain a romantic relationship.
IMO dating is a numbers game. I met my wife on Tinder ~9 years ago. No idea the online dating scene now but even back then Tinder was known as a hookup app. I was very upfront that I was looking for a long-term relationship, on Tinder and another app I was on. I believe you can learn more about a person in 5 minutes in person than you can in any amount of digital communication pre-meet. Another good thing about online dating is both of you know exactly why you are speaking - when you try to convert acquaintances into romantic partners there is a bit of confusion there.
Numbers game because most will not be a good fit, and also you will get rejected a lot. If you are emotionally prepared for commitment then you can be emotionally prepared for disappointment. But once you find a good fit you will find a partner for life! I think you can do it.
>What makes family bonds so strong is that they won’t turn your back on you when you are in a bind. They are much stronger than friends. Stable households are the most important predictor for childhood success.
This is blanket generalization. Such generalizations are (rightfully) hard to prove. It is likely that families are a positive force for _most_ people, but I am not sure if there is research that concludes that every single human would benefit from having a family/should put up with whatever family they have?
Going back to my original point, any "list" of N things cannot possibly fit all humans. Other people might have different opinions based on their own life experiences.
Not sure what you mean by that? Is family always a good thing by definition in your books? (i.e., if X is bad, X is not a family). If so, then your deduction is correct but trivial, and overall the argument doesn't make much sense to me.
I upvoted you but I think you and I might differ in our definition of friend; I think you're right that you have the opportunity to "cast a wide net" so to speak, but an internet search turns up numerous quotes from celebrities that find those relationships lacking in humanity and are void of meaningful connections. I don't think there's anything in fame that inherently precludes you to making true friendships, but you might have to sift more to find them.
>I don't think there's anything in fame that inherently precludes you to making true friendships, but you might have to sift more to find them.
I guess the quantity and variety of interactions you get with fame will quickly desensitise you to the point where normal interaction with people becomes awkward.
Would I have traded it to be an influencer if I could have? Shit yeah in a heartbeat. But unfortunately for me no one wanted to watch me gyrate. (That’s unfair, some people probably would have).
That said. Now I’m a fully bald old man (I just turned 36). I’m not as overweight anymore though I could prob lose a couple of pounds. Blood pressure is good, though.
Would I want to be an influencer? Jet set around the world and stay in lavish hotels for free? Have companies throw products at me? Have thousands or millions of people knowing my every move? Have to give a shit if there’s a stain on my shirt? Hell no.
I want to sit here on my porch with my dog and my wife and do my work. Then at the end of the day I want to turn it off and set it aside. Maybe we’ll go hiking.
I know it sounds glamorous and maybe it’s appealing to some people. But man it’s not for me.