Stop calling them "influencers", they are Sales People. They influence nothing, they sell you the same crap any ad does. Sales people, advertisers, spam, all the same thing.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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They influence the buying decisions of their audience.
I never understood how people like this got that title. They don't influence shit, except maybe consumerism and the dumbing down of society.
They influence the people watching them.
So they have no influence except for the ways that they do?
it's actually already a sales term in ABM - you have the decision maker, blocker, influencer, end user/stakeholder etc
the term has been around longer than the internet
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Not even sales people, just marketing people without a fixed affiliation. The only people they influence are the people for whom the name influencer is not a red flag that they're being lied to.
Having said that, "influencer" is a lot shorter than that, and at least everyone will know what you mean.
They aren't "real" people either way, even the human ones are just drones reading a script that someone paid them to read.
Are you telling me all the podcasters I listen to didn't naturally have the same experience with HelloFresh?
This is how I think about social media in general. It's a spectrum from mostly fake to all fake. Even the least fake profiles still only show the good parts of their life and unedited photos are still hand-picked from a bunch of other ones they don't want people to see.
Hell even my own Pixelfed feed which is 100% landscape photography is all more or less fake. I take hundreds of photos and only publish one or two of the best ones and even those are heavily edited. It gives a totally false impression of how good of an photographer I really am.
Even with people knowing social media is fake or highly edited, It's really doing a number on people's mental health.
What a non-story.
They basically asked: In an ad, do you prefer an actor reading out the marketing script or a computer-rendered face?
I just… don’t watch ads.
Firefox, ublock origin, NextDNS when mobile, pfBlockerNG at home.
I’ve gotten to the point where it’s genuinely jarring if I see an ad on one of my own devices.
Ever watch somebody who doesn't know about all that use the rawdog Internet? It's amazing how people can just sit there, deal with all that, and not go apeshit. The population has been conditioned.
It is pretty insane and depressing that pervasive, jaw-droppingly targeted ads have more or less been completely normalized with the vast majority of the population. I sometimes feel like I have a tin foil hat on when I try to educate people about it these days. Everyone just seems to mostly not care.
I installed uBlock for someone recently. They complained about all the empty space where the ads used to be. So I removed the empty space by blocking that element with uBlock, which increased the width of the main body of the website, and they then complained that the website was too wide...
Some people are beyond help.
You’re way too patient. “Nothing I can do about it” would have been my answer to the first complaint.
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How does that affect you instagram influencer browsing experience?
What’s instagram?
More seriously: I haven’t had any Meta service or app on any EDC/daily use device I own in roughly 8 years. The only device thar explicitly touches meta stuff is an old android phone I have on a separate DMZ network (yes, I know the internet is rife with Meta (et al) tracking vomit these days, but I think this is close to the best a reasonable, technically inclined person can do).
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I dont get why people would care for influencers
I don't get how people can watch reality shows but apparently they do.
Plus entertainment is a great control tool. Give people enough entertainment and they will never revolt.
If the only way to a revolution is making lives more miserable, is the revolution even worthy? Something, something, accelerationism...
One is temporary, the other is perpetuated for eternity through atrocities.
why do people care for Shrek? Or Walter White? Or Antigone?
The concept of caring for fictional narratives is ages old.
And that makes it right?
Anyway the difference now is that peoples opinions are amplified and spread quickly. Combine that with sponsorships and uninformed takes and you are in trouble. It Aldo doesn't help that people these days are lazy and dopamine junkies.
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Personally I despise everything about the idea of influencers. I have yet to see one who wasn’t an outright attention whore or just trying to get free shit.
I don't think it's a bad thing to want to be paid for being the center of attention. There's pathological levels to it for sure, but we're communal, creative creatures. Maybe it depends on how we define influencer, idk. I was gonna comment that younger generations aren't fully developed physiologically, so the appreciation for fully human influence could be chalked up to that
Right. There have been folks getting paid for (and enjoying) being the center of attention since culture has existed. The entire concept of cinema comes from this. I wouldn't call Rowan Atkinson or Penn & Teller "attention whores or people who only want free shit" but they are the "influencers" of their time.
The dynamic has shifted, but I don't see it as some inherently bad thing, this just reads as a "kids bad!" kind of statement.
I can definitely see your point. Celebrities are the center of attention and can influence people. But the two you mentioned, well three actually, are entertainers first and foremost. They had a skillset that was interesting to watch and people would pay to do so. So it gets back to the definition of “influencer”… it’s always the nuance of definition isn’t it 😀
So I guess my definition would include some no talent YouTube or Instagram C-rated “celebrity” that is essentially famous for being famous. They expect special treatment and recognition when it isn’t deserved or warranted. They are often pretentious and obnoxious. When I think of “influencer” this is the image in my mind.
When I think of “influencer” this is the image in my mind.
... OK. But that's not what the term "Influencer" actually means. The actual definition is basically just "anyone with a lot of followers".
And there are plenty of people with a lot of followers who produce great content. For example this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpuX-5E7xoU
But isn't that the whole point of them?
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I don't care if it's a human or a bot trying to sell me something because my ad blocker will make sure I don't even see it.
Probably because we didn’t care about them in the first place
They have too many followers for that to be true. But I don't understand why.
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I mean, who does? They don't act like one.
Does anyody really look at anyone in an ad and say, "Yes, that's a fellow human, I connect with them on a personal level"?
I've been perceiving them as robots since 1986. Because even as a child I knew people in an ad don't act or talk like everybody I knew in real life and what they were portraying was completely made up, unrealistic dialog and scenarios.
Exactly. Marketing generally doesn't try to speak to your rational forebrain. It's going for your subconscious, by design. It's why ads can be so random and still retain efficacy.
I'm a millennial, but I don't necessarily care if the person I'm watching exists or not.
That's not to say there aren't a bunch of other factors involved that would generally steer me away from artificial people (general corporate BS being the obvious one), but all else being equal, I'm totally fine with it.
If it's someone I'm never going to meet either way then it doesn't matter if they're real or not. What matters is the quality of content.
Newsflash: adolescents don’t care who is pushing consumerism to them.
How the internet created ever more hucksters. Went from door-to-door to screen-to-screen salespeople. Topping things off, if they're growing up okay being influenced by a bot, well aren't we all screwed.
My Gen Z son says these are Alphas and he doesn't want to be associated with them.
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