It's still baffling to me that a profession called influencer can exist.
How do people take anything from them serious when their job description is literally taking money in order to influence people...
I guess that's just our society. We love to be told what we should feel/do/care about on a societal level, so people gobble it up even if the content is obviously just paid marketing
What's even more horrifying is that this is considered a legitimate career; in fact, it's what a lot of kids today want to be, in lieu of pursuing something socially useful.
Let's be clear here: being an influencer literally means you're voluntarily accepting money for lying to people, at scale. You enrich yourself by harming others. You're actively proving you're corrupted and cannot be trusted.
How people making this choice are not shunned by society is beyond me.
I dislike influencers as well but this comment is painfully incorrect. Beeing an influencer does not mean you have to lie. You are however strongly influenced to lie. But that doesn't mean every influencer lies. There are plenty of very big influencer that can easily pick and choose which product they peddle to the masses. They are free to pick only the products where they agree with the marketing message.
I think it's probably hard to distinguish what you truly "agree with" if your income relies on agreeing with it. You can avoid shilling for things you truly know are just out and out scams (although it will make your career harder, sure, before you are successful enough to call the shots yourself), but you have a lot of interest in convincing yourself you like the things that pay you. Reminds me of the well-known Upton Sinclair quote “It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it."
But if there are some influencers that make it very clear on all social media that it's a "paid placement", that they are getting paid to shill for the thing -- then I would definitely have a lot more respect for those folks. I'm not sure this is possible though? it would definitely make your "job" a lot harder, and that is telling.
But I don't necessarily want to demonize influencers; I more feel sorry for them, most of whom are hustling without making a ton of money. But the whole thing seems very sordid to me.
> I think it's probably hard to distinguish what you truly "agree with" if your income relies on agreeing with it.
The simple solution is to only agree to represent products you actually like. For influencers who are popular enough that they can pick and choose, this isn't all that hard.
The thorny issue is the smaller influencers (who are the majority, for sure) who have to take whatever is offered to pay their bills.
> For influencers who are popular enough that they can pick and choose, this isn't all that hard.
Sure, but there's no way for me as a viewer to tell whether a given influencer is making honest choices, or just peddling whatever shit pays them the most. In fact, the whole value of influencers to the marketers is that they confuse people on this very issue, that they convince people they're being honest even though they're not.
> The thorny issue is the smaller influencers (who are the majority, for sure) who have to take whatever is offered to pay their bills.
Right. And since the popular influencers started as such smaller ones and most likely had to compromise their ethics right at the start, why should I believe they suddenly found their moral compass again once they became popular?
I don't know about the metaphysics of what constitutes "lying", but if you're going to define it like that clearly there is unethical marketing behavior that is not exactly "lying".
I think it's crazy that it has become routine to shill for things without clearly disclosing that you are getting paid to do so, in ways that violate FTC regulations which pre-social-media would have been actually enforced.
The FTC says:
> If you endorse a product through social media, your endorsement message should make it obvious when you have a relationship (“material connection”) with the brand. A “material connection” to the brand includes a personal, family, or employment relationship or a financial relationship – such as the brand paying you or giving you free or discounted products or services.
We all know that is in fact simply not done. (Sure, the clever among us know that anyone that seems to be an "influencer" is getting paid for endorsements; but it is not generally actually disclosed, we just have to assume, and if you see an individual video who's to say if it's an ordinary consumer sharing a review as a one-off, unless you are cynical or knowledgeable enough to know that doesn't really even exist anymore, everyone is on the take).
The FTC again:
> If a brand gives you free or discounted products or other perks and then you mention one of its products, make a disclosure even if you weren’t asked to mention that product.
I'm not sure what you want from me at this point. I simply disagreed with the clearly wong statement of the person I was replying to that all influencers are liars. Nothing more nothing less. I didn't, nor want to, discuss the morality that a lot of influencers peddle crap without disclosure.
Replace "lying" with "misleading" then, I'd call shilling without disclosure "misleading" without a doubt.
I am just discussing the ethics of "influencers" generally rather than trying to win a debate necessarily, but I think the picture the original commenter paints is largely accurate, and you are maybe quibbling over semantics of "lying" vs "misleading" that don't seem to be fundamental to the question to me.
But yeah, we have not much more to say on it I think.
I think this demonstrates how _insidious_ influencer marketing is. We feel like we're privvy to the behind the scenes decision making about this influencer or that one. But we aren't. We don't really know if they are really choosing the products they wish to promote, or if there are other considerations that influenced that decision.
The aim of influencer marketing is to leverage parasocial relationships to sell stuff, and it works because people think of influencers more like 'a somewhat distant friend' than a talking head or a traditional paid promoter.
Sales and marketing people aren't the face of the ad though.
I'm more comfortable with "Coca-cola pays me money to make ads on behalf of Coca-cola" compared to "literally any company pays me to pretend I'm just a regular person who discovered this cool new product and it's so life-changing that I have to tell my loyal followers"
Those aren't new; what's new is opening up of a whole dimension, on which celebrities are clustered on one edge. "Traditional" celebrities are widely-known, but low on "parasocial value"[0]. Influencers are less well-known, but higher on parasocial value. There's been talk of nanoinfluencing, which are very low on being well-known, very high on parasocial; I guess this just got implemented by TikTok.
And it's worth highlighting what parasocial marketing means: it means exploiting natural desire of people to form bonds, in order to peddle wares. It's another kind of abusing people for profit.
And yes, technically marketing on the other edge of known/parasocial spectrum isn't new either - it's occupied by people joining MLMs, who are duped into burning friendships and family ties in order to make money in a totally-not-pyramid scheme. The new thing is all the points between celebrities and MLM zombies being occupied by different kinds of influencers.
> And it's worth highlighting what parasocial marketing means: it means exploiting natural desire of people to form bonds, in order to peddle wares. It's another kind of abusing people for profit.
I get why that sounds bad, but is it always bad? Is there something inherently bad about the movie podcasts I’ve listened to for 10 years having brief Squarespace sponsor breaks?
Does the badness go away when I subscribe on Patreon and get ad-free episodes? I mean either way they are “exploiting my natural desire to form bonds and using that for financial benefit.” And yet, it doesn’t feel that bad to me. It feels like I’m just paying for original creative content, even though it’s true that a big part of why I like the content is the parasocial relationship I have with the hosts.
There's a degree of self-awareness to it. You know what's going on in your relationship with the podcaster, so you're much less affected (or perhaps not at all). But imagine a more naive version of yourself - one that doesn't understand how parasocial relationship works, and instead implicitly trusts the podcaster because they deluded themselves into thinking they're their friend.
It's like, remember when everyone and their dog started peddling shady VPNs on YouTube? Or how they're all peddling NFTs now? You and me understand what those products are, and we can just roll our eyes and continue to consume content. But others in the audience? Suffice to say, I now regularly have to dissuade my family members and people in their circles from buying into bullshit that's eagerly promoted by their favorite YouTube stars.
Yes, and I've held that opinion for a long time, and expressed it wrt. marketing in general here many times. But there are degrees to how blatantly one gets paid for defrauding your fellow people, and influencers are near the top of it.
If we’re going to start shunning people for that level of harmful impact I think this board might be affected at a higher rate than the average population. Isn’t a large chunk of the users here employees from firms making all their money off of ads?
I don’t see how advertisements aren’t lying and manipulation at scale in a meaningfuly different capacity
Sure, I'm not denying it. I still[0] maintain that advertising is a cancer on modern society, and I've successfully steered my career away from anything related to adtech. HN itself is a diverse crowd, there's a large crowd with strong anti-marketing sentiment here, including people currently working in adtech.
Also, there are degrees to everything. I'm picking on influencing here because it's extremely direct and blatant form of manipulation. If that isn't rejected by society at large, then there's no hope for it dealing with more traditional forms of manipulation.
I'm exploring the idea here because I haven't given it much thought before, so don't take the following as an aggressive defense.
Couldn't influencers be considered a more positive form of advertising in that they are open about what they are? I've always had more trouble with insidious types of advertisements or ones where the relationship between someone reviewing an item and the vendor isn't disclosed. When I know someone is an influence/tech evangelist/promoter/some other term, I at least can have my mental guard up, which is not something I can keep up 24/7
> so don't take the following as an aggressive defense.
I won't, but I appreciate the clarification nonetheless. I'm also trying to be non-confrontational, and while my opinion on ads is rather firm, it's still subject to change as I understand the world and the human condition more.
> Couldn't influencers be considered a more positive form of advertising in that they are open about what they are? (...) When I know someone is an influence/tech evangelist/promoter/some other term, I at least can have my mental guard up (...)
So, we have to distinguish between the two kinds of influencers here. Brand ambassadors, tech evangelists and the like are at least somewhat open about this (though elsewhere in the thread I've seen examples of ones that are purposefully unclear). It still feels icky to me, but I understand the game. Though again, many don't - I've seen plenty of people buy into what tech evangelists say uncritically, in part because their enthusiasm is an effective manipulation tactic, acting on an emotional level to get around peoples' defenses.
And then there are the other kind of influencers - the ones I believe are the majority on social media. The ones running random streams and channels, some sneaking in paid product placement covertly, some doing sponsorship section overtly - in both cases, the reason they're being paid is because of (for a lack of better term) trust transfer. You like the podcasts some influencer makes, so you mistakenly assume their recent interest in cosmetics is genuine. You like the high-quality science videos a YouTuber creates, so you assume they know what they're talking about when they pitch you a VPN service in the sponsorship section - even though, in truth, they have no first clue about it, and are setting you up for a bad deal. Either way, they don't care - you're not their peer, you're not their friend. You're the resource they're exploiting.
What irks me the most is when I see people intentionally seeking out career as this latter kind of influencer. They're already convinced that a degree of dishonesty is totally legitimate way of making money. I call it dishonesty, because I doubt they'd pitch the same cosmetics or NFTs to their mother or their close friends, in the same way they do to their audience on their channel.
> their job description is literally taking money in order to influence people
I mean, that's literally just a descirption of marketing, right? Or Public Relations. Taking money to influence people? It's a whole industry.
What an influencer brings to it is that they use one person's own personal likeness as a 'brand'... and try not to disclose the extent to which they are getting paid for marketing and/or PR. Which yeah, takes an already suspicious industry and makes it both more so and more... pathetic, if that's the right word. Most attempted "influencers" are struggling/hustling without making a ton of money, but even those who are successful seem just in a sad place to me.
An influencer, IMO, is no different from a talk show host, radio personality, or anyone who's livelihood depends on sponsored content. We've had models in advertising forever and famous people endorse products.
What's happening here is someone is getting famous outside of the traditional avenues of entertainment (radio, tv, sports, movies) through social media and getting the same sponsorship deals. They've just been given a bad name to lump them all together. I'm not a fan of the label "influencer" but I think it's nonsense to see them as a sign of societal decay. Societal change maybe, but its not dire IMO.
As you say, it is a job category that has existed for a long time. (In addition to examples already given, other specific titles off the top of my head spanning centuries: cigarette girls, playboy bunnies, bar girls, steak ladies, brand ambassadors, spokespersons, sign spinners, spokesmodels, …) As long as marketing has existed these jobs have also existed, they've just always before been typically given extremely specific names, often (especially in old fashioned ones) so specific even to specific genders.
I think it actually is useful to have a generic term for this as well across that multi-century spectrum of too specifically named and niched sub-jobs. It makes a useful lens to even better describe our own history. ("What's a cigarette girl? Well in the height of Big Tobacco the Tobacco companies would pay ladies, generally pretty ones, to be influencers selling cigarettes at other businesses such as a bars. Many of these influencers were not employees of the bars, they were more directly contractors for the Tobacco companies.")
I even think that the generic sense of revulsion many have to the specific word "influencer" is actually a useful part of that, too. These jobs were never pretty. Many were designed to be in the background marketing things to people like bad magic tricks designed to misdirect slight bits of money. Influencers are not necessarily a bad thing, and those are sometimes useful jobs in their own little ways, but having the generic term itself be a little revulsive is maybe a great reminder that they aren't always our (parasocial) friends, either, and are still trying to sell us stuff at the end of the day.
(A lot of people assumed cigarette girls worked for the bars or restaurants they found them in, when really that was a direct marketing arm of the cigarette companies. Alcohol companies to this day also hire a lot of "brand ambassadors" the now gender neutral, PC term that they prefer over "influencer", though "bar girls" was also a name for that not even that many decades back, and these influencers do the exact same thing: there are people in bars selling you alcohol, with the permission of the bar owners, of course, but employed by the marketing arms of the alcohol companies. Because they aren't bar employees they are legally "allowed" to often "get more personal" and sometimes don't even pretend to be "on the clock" working. Even more fun, some of these "brand ambassadors" for alchohol are only barely paid in like product because these "brand ambassadors" are doing it "on their own" "for fun" like a rewards program and multi-level marketing had a baby that decided selling alcohol to already drunk people was a perfect business model, which is also a fun way to skirt labor laws if you can get it and maybe not obvious with a title like "brand ambassador" but a bit easier to suspect if you call it "influencer".)
It just tells you how broken the understanding of value in current society really is.
When someone posting videos of themselves testing lipstick or 10 dollar dresses makes more money than dozens highly trained real engineers that build physical goods necessary for the betterment of society and the world as a whole, it does in fact explain, to some extent, why we have a child book author running the entirety of hard work of generations of people that built the German industry into the ground.
What you're doing is kind of like claiming society values Powerball winners over engineers because Powerball winners make more money.
> When someone posting videos of themselves testing lipstick or 10 dollar dresses makes more money than dozens highly trained real engineers that build physical goods necessary for the betterment of society and the world as a whole
Some people who do that almost every single day for years eventually work up to that. For every one person who reaches that mark as an influencer there are 1000 more who do that work and make... zilch. It's like winning the lottery with a little bit of agency sprinkled in.
Equity is a thing, but I don't know many engineers working for zero dollars on the hope that one day maybe they'll get lucky and become one of the minority of engineers who make any money...
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Also:
> why we have a child book author running the entirety of hard work of generations of people that built the German industry into the ground.
Very very few "influencers" make more money than engineers.
("Engineers"... when software engineers largely working on advertising and smoothing commerce to sell people garbage they don't need make more money than most "real engineers that build physical goods necessary for the betterment of society"... yeah, it's not just about the influencers, we can look in the mirror, the majority (although not all) of software engineers making mid-six-figures are probably working on selling people crap one way or another, not making anything necessary for the "betterment of society")
But yeah, the vast majority of "influencers" are hustling and struggling and dreaming of being the very succesful 1% while in fact barely making enough to get by. Which seems to me important to talk about when we start talking about "influencers" as as a class or career. There are a tiny portion of "influencers" who get mega-wealthy, we hear about them because they are click bait for media coverage of course (very meta).
In general, becoming a software engineer through a boot camp would be a lot more reliable way to make $100-$200K than being an "influencer" -- you don't even need to be a very good coder to break $100K, which most influencers (let alone aspiring influencers) don't break.
The labor theory of value is not real, only the subjective theory of value is. People pay for what they like. Who are you to judge why people shouldn't value others testing lipstick over some engineers?
The labor theory of value is "not real" in the sense that it doesn't correctly describe how the market works at scale. At the same time, it is real in the sense that it's a close approximation of what we consider intrinsically fair.
Now, you can claim the judgement of the market should replace people's sense of fairness. In that case, there's no problem. Or, you can see the market being misaligned with our sense of fairness as a bug, and ask how it can be fixed.
Fair. However I like your closing sentence before you edited just now:
> Or, instead, you can ask how can the market be coerced to be more fair.
I explicitly don't see the market being misaligned with our sense of fairness as a bug, because I am not one to judge what people like, as I mentioned. For the one making lipstick videos, I will not tell them that their work is less valuable than engineers', because, as I mentioned, it is not for me to decide. If their viewers like it, then that's good for them.
> Fair. However I like your closing sentence before you edited just now:
>> Or, instead, you can ask how can the market be coerced to be more fair.
I edited it to make it closer to what I meant. "Coercing the market" feels too much like giving people green light to force their opinions on others, which is already a big problem in modern society, and I'm not advocating more of it.
What I'm after here is what I believe is a human universal, even if fuzzy in details: the hierarchy of value based on how much one's contributing to others' well-being. It's the one that would place farmers, doctors, garbage collectors and sanitation engineers near the top, and influencers near the bottom.
The way the market allocates rewards doesn't reflect the social or personal importance in any way - it reflects the ability of a person to capture rewards. Farmers, rescue workers, cleaners, etc. get little, because their work has been optimized to extreme degree. They are worse off because of scaling. Successful[0] entertainers and influencers get a lot, because they benefit from scaling - near-zero marginal cost of any additional member of the audience means that, even thought they provide small amount of value to each person and receive small reward, it adds up to a lot of money.
This mechanism, few people serving a tiny value multiplied by large audience, is just one of the "money printers". There are others, like controlling the way money flows (advertisers), or skimming off the high volume of money flow (finance), etc. Point being, all those mechanisms feel like they're exploiting the structure of the market, instead of being a useful service to others.
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[0] - Almost forgot about this, but it's probably the critical thing: these jobs are in a winner-takes-all market.
Influencers/marketers don't create anything. If they all got vaporized by aliens, people would just watch/play something else and buy slightly different products, and the world would go without much of a hitch.
If all the makers disappeared overnight, shit would get crazy in a hurry. Faster even for things like plumbers/electricians/etc, who get paid less than engineers ironically.
Tell me again about the value that influencers create.
How do people take anything from them serious when their job description is literally taking money in order to influence people...
I guess that's just our society. We love to be told what we should feel/do/care about on a societal level, so people gobble it up even if the content is obviously just paid marketing