A lot of these social media promotions work by having people with high follower counts blast you out and try to get their followers to follow you.
The problem is that it is not an audience that would normally be interested in or engage in your content naturally. There are often artificial incentives to follow or engage in someone's content. Often there is some kind of prize giveaway from a "celebrity", that you have to follow everyone on a list to qualify. That celebrity then gets paid to blast out the promotion.
Then after the promotion all of a sudden your massive number of new followers aren't engaging with your content anymore. What are the algorithms going to assume now? Naturally that your content is no longer any good.
It's common for influencers to share screenshots of their analytics or publish them on their websites for people looking for influencers. While the numbers might look impressive, unfortunately, due to how the algorithms work -- mainly things like vector embeddings and placing influencers in a some high dimensional space, the algorithms no longer target and recommend your content to an audience that would be interested.
It used to be that brands would look at your follower count and see how many likes / comments you were getting, but even this is faked now. As your engagement (likes / comments as a percentage of your followers) goes down, they are sometimes artificially propped up by purchasing likes and comments. This worsens your engagement and leads to an endless downward cycle.
While someone might survive for a short while as an influencer using these black hat strategies, brands will be unlikely to use you again if they have not seen tangible results.
Also, if you intend to sell a product or have a certain ideal customer avatar you are trying to market to, it makes sense to do as much as you can to get engagement from that (and only that) demographic.
Follower counts might look impressive on the surface but what ultimately matters is whether you see conversions for your business / brand.
Also, I really wish social media platforms provided better tools and didn't have policies that penalized you for deleting followers that are bots or junk followers.
As a Las Vegas photographer that works primarily with models, I often have random profiles blasting out my work. These profiles mostly find sexy content and blast it out in hopes of growing their own profiles. This mostly resulted in my followers being 95% men from outside the US. This does absolutely nothing for increasing my engagement with my actual target audience (female models or would be models in the Las Vegas metro area wanting to book photoshoots).
Unfortunately Instagram penalizes you and has actually removed the search functionality from my follower list because I was using it to delete bots and junk followers. They won't say this officially but their support ignores my requests for why this functionality no longer works.
Bot accounts prop up their KPIs and they directly provide revenue. They have clear incentives to allow such bots and junk accounts to thrive on their platform.
It sucks how everything became a trick. Everything is a game and almost everyone is trying to find a way to cheat legally. Result is that all these influencers end up being liars and cheaters because no honest person can compete in such environment.
So then the next generation ends up being essentially raised by cheaters and liars. This is who their heroes are. Worse, they get used to the aesthetics of the cheaters and lose appreciation for honesty. They might perceive plain honesty as cringeworthy or awkward. Literally, they will grow up to feel uncomfortable with the truth. I've met many people like that but it's going to get worse.
I say this a lot in the context of reliability engineering, but it's moreso something I've learned from life. Any sufficiently complex system has rules which means they have incentives (and disincentives!), any system with sufficiently complex rules is a game. You can either craft the game in such a way that the 99% do what you want and the outliers are intentionally marginalized or you can let the 1% run the show according to the meta rules your incentives taught them and make everyone else observers. Social media is the story of the latter.
Great observation. That's why I think rules and structures should be kept simple and minimal. The economy isn't supposed to be a game because people's lives are at stake. Social media algorithms are now an integral part of the economy so their complexity and obscurity poses a significant problem.
I'm not sure a simple system is better. Distributed systems, even people systems, are necessarily complex. Making them simpler does not correlate to better.
The harder work is teaching people who craft systems to think deeply about the relationships and possibilities among the weights of incentives and disincentives. Think, balancing scales rather than questioning the quantity of what's on the scales as a first principle.
We can't simply act like social platforms and apps aren't the primary enablers and profiteers in this ecosystem. Instead of hiring honest tech visionaries, they hire social psychologists to design features that waste time and work like slot machines, while giving little value to users just trying to earn a living or make a name for themselves. These platforms also have no incentive to help anyone to succeed naturally/organically because they also conflictingly sell ad space.
Everything about most modern social media is phony, they even ratio criticism and brigade against truth about their schemes and negative news both on and off their own platforms.
Even Elon spent 44 Billion to dominate the attention game and it didn't work out well for him. There simply can't be a monopoly on attention, but tech is always trying to make it happen in the most underhanded ways, and then turning to profiting from deception when they can't keep it together.
Universal Studios gave me the keys to a Facebook page for a hugely famous movie that had 2,000,000 followers (this was 2012). I had a fan page for the same movie with 30,000 followers.
Whatever I posted to both pages, my fan page would get 10X the engagement and 10X the sales of merch than the bigger page.
It taught me a big lesson on numbers v. engagement.
I sometimes see certain memes related to some corporate content pick up a ton of traction online and can't help but wonder if they're organic or manufactured. Spreading subtle ads through memes is probably still an under-explored area of marketing and it bypasses modern ad-blocking techniques. The way I learned of Invincible was through a couple memes, which eventually lead me to research and watch the series.
To give a concrete example of another trend: a few years back there was this group trend on TikTok of going to the theater dressed up in a suit to watch some animated movie. You would only need to pay a couple of large accounts to engage in this trend, and then others will follow along because they want to fit in.
Another dimension through which content marketing will probably expand in the future is by creating media that encourages people to take sides and engage in discussions, like Giant Monkey vs Giant Reptile, who wins? This trend is very popular within the political landscape, but it could probably be twisted for fictional IPs as well.
I feel bad because I mention it here all the time but "Trust me I'm Lying" is a great book about modern guerilla marketing that gives some concrete examples of the sort of things I'm always skeptical of in "organic" online content. If I were in some corporate or state think tank I'd be spending all day trying to figure out how to get some post about "my wife's shirt" on the front page of Reddit with my product or propaganda in the background.
I don't love the increasing difficulty in telling if something is genuine human expression or a marketing technique designed to look like genuine expression. But as dystopian as that murkiness can seem, I still prefer it to peak 90's pre-internet advertising when record-breaking ad spending was primarily used to scream relentless in our faces until we bought stuff or developed a mental illness. Media in that era was far more monolithic and almost entirely ad-driven, and it really felt like the advertisers (and their favorite brands and multinationals) had won all the battles and the war. All that was left was to watch the latest Visa-sponsored TV event, brought you you by Honda, with special considerations from MetLife, all before a word from our sponsors over at Nestle. Even the punk festival was run by a shoe company in the 90s.
Anyway, now I sometimes get ads for stuff that isn't shilled by a multi-billion-dollar multinational and I barely every have to watch an actual advertisement, so my vote goes to new hell over old hell, no question.
Really? To me the murkiness seems much more dangerous. In the 90s you had a clear sense of what was "TV reality" versus what was actual reality. You would compartmentalize and take "TV reality" for what it was: A source of entertainment, not a source of information, and you would develop a mental spam filter that would prevent the messaging from getting to you. With social media, all of this is getting much harder.
There are already many people today who cannot tell the difference in realities, and likely many people who think they can but only succeed some of the time.
It's so pervasive that soon it will become the 'only' reality (online) and then it's too late. This is what the marketing people want, just like the sugar companies.
> Spreading subtle ads through memes is probably still an under-explored area of marketing and it bypasses modern ad-blocking techniques.
In this vein, I encourage you to search about the 2016 russian interference, and the tactics of the IRA (Internet Research Agency, a russian troll farm). It's been eye-opening for me how was heavily in Twitter/Tumblr in those years about the quantity (and quality) of manipulated memes and astroturfed viral content in social networks.
There was this weird "meme" going around a few months ago about Dreamworks vs Disney that lined up extraordinarily hard with the release of "Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken" movie. (Release to theaters, I should say)
I can't say that I'm a distinguished memer, but I've consumed my fair number of memes. But a lot of this "meme" was about hating on Disney + talking about how Dreamworks movies were better.
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On the one hand: "memes" that sprung up organically about say, Shrek, have this raunchy quality to them that likely is toxic to advertising partners. (Gay sex, sex jokes, implied rape, etc. etc.). Meme culture is famously toxic, especially as it comes out of 4chan. So in a sense, the "raunchiness" is the proof that its likely not corporate.
But this "Teenage Kraken" meme was ... "tame" so to speak? A lot of "The Little Mermaid" hate, but nothing that matched my familiar memeing patterns. Sure, people hate on "The Little Mermaid" and had a ton of memes making fun of that movie, but... to see some memes pivot into what turned into a "Teenage Kraken" advertisement was so weird and offputting to me.
So I've always wondered if "Teenage Kraken vs Ariel" memes were Dreamworks guerilla marketing. Just me personally. Especially because "Teenage Kraken" wasn't a very popular movie, so its such a strange subject to "meme". Memes usually work the opposite way: the movie comes out and then months or years later, the memes take hold.
The timing was all wrong. The meme wasn't as raunchy or mean as normal memes. It lined up with (attempted) corporate profits to advertise a movie that was soon to be released in theaters. It was a relatively unpopular movie in the great scheme of things. Etc. etc. etc.
Trying to get a grasp on consensus nowadays on any question on the internet is almost impossible.
Way too much astroturfing, shills and what I suspect are semiautomatic bots.
For reviews, Youtube reviews seem to be the best approach. At worst it becomes like a TV shop commercial and you can see that the table saw can atleast actually saw or if it behaves like it would have bad quality.
Some people seem genuine in the 'still too small for money to be made' channels. But it seems like there are not a lot of subscribera needed before they start to make ads for VPNs... so they are approached by marketing quite early.
I've noticed that in my hobby (guitar), all the influencers will release the same equipment reviews at the exact same time. They often refer to each other, and do co-labs. Lots of "my buddy" referrals, so to speak...
As for the first point, that's just how marketing works these days. All the big influencers will get the equipment weeks before, test it out, and make reviews with the clause that they can't say anything about it until the agreed time. It of course feels highly coordinated, and those new releases absolutely dominate the social media, when the release/drop happens.
Then all the smaller influencers will feed off that, and drop their own reviews the next days / weeks, or whenever they get the equipment.
At one point, one starts to think - is it all authentic, or just made-up stuff to increase views, affiliate sales, etc.
(This, of course, pales in comparison to the teen/beauty/etc. influencers, that will band together in a shared house, create PR friendships purely to pump up numbers, etc.)
Shipping pre-production test devices is a long-established practise that predates the influencer era by decades.
Critics view movies before their release. Tech products are shipped to tech publications beforehand. Journalists have access to many press releases before they're published and on and on.
The benefits for those involved are clear: Sources get a coordinated press storm. Sources can restrict access to flattering publications. The publications can "instantly" release an in-depth review and beat their competition.
It's "only" all consumers who lose out. A free market might provide independent reviewers with a chance to beat the selected few on quality.
> Shipping pre-production test devices is a long-established practise that predates the influencer era by decades
The critics had brands and reputations. The side effect of having so many critics, now, is they've become commoditised. I know every influencer believes they have a brand. But for the most part they're generic (within a category) to the algorithms that decide whether they're surfaced or not.
We're closer to the Cambrian explosion of the late 19th century, at the dawn of mass marketing and snake-oil salesmen, than the broadcast era we're leaving behind.
Exactly. And any time I've had an pre-release product it's always come with a note from the manufacturer with the "embargo" date on it -- the date on which I'm allowed to actually talk about it. So, of course, everyone starts talking about it on that same date.
Break the embargo and you get cut off from future goodies.
> It of course feels highly coordinated, and those new releases absolutely dominate the social media, when the release/drop happens.
The manufacturers have a review embargo in place, and the "influencers" release their reviews as soon as they're able to. So ya, it's coordinated, but not by some crazy influencer cabal.
It's like mainstream media. If you follow them across several countries you see the exact same pattern: they work on something together but put an embargo on the release. Then when they decide it's time to push the narrative, suddenly all mainstream newspaper write about, say, how masks do not work vs Covid, then one month later they all write at the same time how masks work against Covid, lately it's been a coordinated attack on Dubai (not that there aren't shady things there).
It's not about whether they're right or not: it's the complete and total narrative control and coordination that is hard to stomach.
> Influencer cartels can improve consumer welfare if they expand social media engagement to the target audience
> Back-of-the-envelope calculations (based on regression analysis) show that if advertisers pay for cartel engagement as if it were natural engagement, they receive only 3–18% of the value with general cartels, and 60–85% with topic cartels.
First, users don't benefit from cartel engagement at all. The authors have forgotten to factor in opportunity costs of 100%. A "85% good" engagement that pushes a 100% engagement from my feed costs me 15%. This is plainly obvious by, well, the need to form a cartel in the first place.
Second, the authors define both good engagement and topic cartels by comment similarity. You can't get any other result other than that topic cartels beat general cartels.
Third, the column uses stuffy language. Write clearly and you spot mistakes such as one and two more easily.
Fourth, as a regular app user I regard everything influencer-shilled as negative welfare – but that's just my opinion.
This has existed since the whole ‘influencer’ phenomenon began, particularly on social media. I recall reading an article in 2014 about how Samsung allegedly spread slander against HTC. It’s the reason why I don’t rely on YouTube for reviews, tutorials, or anything beyond pure entertainment or documentaries. It seems that everyone is compensated in one way or another. In fact, monetization is the reason why social media has devolved into this state.
This is at least as old as the Digg Payola schemes. Digg had cartels that would massive boost the upvotes of some content and then bury other content. They'd also go and astroturf in the comments on those upvoted posts to artificially boost engagement.
Eh if you looked around silicon valley 5/10/15 years ago, Apple had basically won among the programmers and founders there. So they wouldn't really need astroturfers here.
I remember it differently. There was a sudden onslaught of bewilderingly techie-appealing novelties out of Cupertino in the 2006-2008 time window: unibody notebooks, iOS/iPhone, the MacBook Air, Intel CPUs in their computers (of great interest back then to whoever compiles software), and the macOS X version 10.5 "Leopard" that introduced (or surfaced) built-in common Unix command-line tools and unixy shell. Back then, in the overall hardware & OS landscape of the day, on here — all that stuff happening nearly-at-once / ongoingly was marketing itself all by itself.
Absolutely, they were just making far and away the best laptops for web dev at the time. And that yielded a lot of really useful, really polished software for web devs, creating a sort of virtuous cycle. I don’t think one needs to look much further than that for some conspiracy of HN astroturfers, a lot of people just find it the best. Lots of companies spend a ton on marketing, maybe they don’t do it as well as Apple, but geeks are going to shift away if it sucks.
And Apple has made a lot of missteps since then, so maybe their dominance will waver. I’ve been looking at going pure NixOS, personally, been hearing decent reviews of Frameworks. Still don’t think the complete package is quite enough to unseat Mac laptop ssh’d to linux workstation for me, but it’s getting closer.
And I’m sure they’re not killing themselves to do a great job for you. The people in SV I’m talking about certainly weren’t working for you. Many of them were founders of companies you’ve heard of.
Those people in SV seeded the HN community, that was my point about astroturfers not being needed to explain the grassroots support here. Maybe Apple employs them, who knows, but you’d see strong support here regardless.
The whole setup also rewards influencers with questionable moral compasses.
One of the ones I’m following is trying to find sponsors that pay a their workers a fair wage. Self imposed requirements like that murder the size pool of potential sponsor matches.
So what do you tell them? Lower your ethical standards to pay rent? Entire setup has crappy incentive alignment
I feel like this has existed for all of the early influencers who continue to peddle their mediocre NYT mostly self-help bestsellers. Probably even to name a name, something that Ryan Holiday infamously wrote about early in his publishing career.
I knew a person who did some type of manipulation for their TikTok up to 550k followers in 2020-2021. They would average maybe 2k views a video(thus horrible engagement), but they would dupe many advertisers for thousands of dollars to "reach 550k followers" by peddling all sorts of useless products.
I believe this pattern is very rampant in social media and heavily manipulated, especially today for stuff nobody wants to buy but platforms are pushing consumerism/advertising. I wrote a book on how ridiculous social media is nowadays called "Enough". If anyone wants a free copy, feel free to send me an email.
Basically, swindlers swindling swindlers. Advertising industry is not some paragon of ethics; it shouldn't be surprised that people who deceive others for a living will use the same techniques within industry as they use on regular people.
Everyone is trying to manipulate everything. It’s the age of grift.
Go on any social media website and you’ll be used as means to an end in many ways: ads will be shown to you for ad revenue, you will be tracked so your data can be sold, the platforms will expose you to content that drives addiction, and to content that aligns with their politics. On top of that, influencers will try to sell their sponsor’s products through parasocial relationships with you. In between all that, dark patterns will mislead you to buy more subscriptions, and community guidelines will commodify any social interaction you desire into an ad-friendly non-controversial synthetic content. All that will be used to train an LLM or two, potentially stealing your art and your career. Your data will eventually leak and your identity will be used as means to an end on the black market, to enable further grifts like identity theft, phishing and scamming. And if you dare have any other monetizable human desires, like dating, they will be monetized even if they never needed to be. And the money everyone made from you will be used to lobby against you. All to ensure the next generation — your kids — is exploited as means to an end more effectively, from a younger age. And just in case there isn’t enough grift and someone comes up with a new method, EULAs can change without notice at any time to enshittify the grift more.
It’s just layers of grift modeled around a minimum viable products. It’s grift on grift on grift… all the way down.
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I wonder if you are downvoted for the last two snarky sentences or the entire comment.
The business model is similar to payola. The companies who are marketing via influencers would probably collude to drive up prices to the degree they could, that is why there are so many laws around that area of commerce.
As far as influencers go, it's sort of a weird space. Imagine the popular kids in high school selling Mary Kay or Amway out of their lockers.
> If a cartel generates engagement from influencers with other interests (meat lovers), this hurts consumers and advertisers. It hurts consumers because the platform will show them irrelevant content, and advertisers are hurt because their ads are shown to the wrong audience.
Even when the content is relevant it still hurts consumers because ads are manipulation, and supports a system of invasive spying that gets used for things far outside of the scope of advertising, and because it only shows consumers what influencers are paid to push/shill for with zero consideration to other things like the quality of those products/services, and because it only encourages the "filter bubble" problem where the obsession over targeting audiences causes people to be exposed to an artificially narrow subset of what is available.
The best thing for consumers would be if people with online platforms honestly and transparently promoted a highly diverse range of products (including people) that they themselves genuinely like and are interested in.
The problem is that it is not an audience that would normally be interested in or engage in your content naturally. There are often artificial incentives to follow or engage in someone's content. Often there is some kind of prize giveaway from a "celebrity", that you have to follow everyone on a list to qualify. That celebrity then gets paid to blast out the promotion.
Then after the promotion all of a sudden your massive number of new followers aren't engaging with your content anymore. What are the algorithms going to assume now? Naturally that your content is no longer any good.
It's common for influencers to share screenshots of their analytics or publish them on their websites for people looking for influencers. While the numbers might look impressive, unfortunately, due to how the algorithms work -- mainly things like vector embeddings and placing influencers in a some high dimensional space, the algorithms no longer target and recommend your content to an audience that would be interested.
It used to be that brands would look at your follower count and see how many likes / comments you were getting, but even this is faked now. As your engagement (likes / comments as a percentage of your followers) goes down, they are sometimes artificially propped up by purchasing likes and comments. This worsens your engagement and leads to an endless downward cycle.
While someone might survive for a short while as an influencer using these black hat strategies, brands will be unlikely to use you again if they have not seen tangible results.
Also, if you intend to sell a product or have a certain ideal customer avatar you are trying to market to, it makes sense to do as much as you can to get engagement from that (and only that) demographic.
Follower counts might look impressive on the surface but what ultimately matters is whether you see conversions for your business / brand.