I checked out a few "influencers" out of curiosity when I first heard the term. It's far worse than Cokie and Cramer. I mean, at least they are mildly interesting to watch or listen to. The new sort seemed invariably dull and vacuous to me. Unwatchable, unlistenable, unreadable, like Season 4 of 'Do you poop enough' on channel 138. I'm not even that picky. I figured it must be mostly fake.
On the other hand, the Internet makes so many people aware of scams so there is less chance of any particular target falling for it. Of course, some people get so over sensitized to scams that they filter out all legitimate items to thinking it may be a scam.
Scammers also don't need to fool all people some of the time - just some people all of the time. Nigerian Prince Scamming already filters for maximizing gullibility to reduce time wasteage.
Back in ancient times, scammers placed small ads in the back of comic books and computer ad catalogs and gardening magazines and the like. I remember one case where a guy placed an ad that said, "Send $1 to [his P.O. box]" and made some money over the course of a few months before anyone complained. He didn't promise to send anything for the dollar, so iirc he wasn't prosecuted.
I loved seeing those ads in vintage Archie comics ('60s-'80s editions). Those ads wouldn't bother including a photo, but usually had a nicely drawn artist's rendering. That to me spelled a certain kind of commitment to the scam. Today, all they'd have to do is select the right demographic on FB ads (usually people who "also express interest in" IQ pills or some other snake oil), and click a button to put the text-only ad live.
Maybe add a bad Photoshop image if you're feeling creative.
> This is how it works: someone working at facebook is taking bribes in exchange for the blue mark, a middle man will take your money (anywhere between $1000 and $15000 dollars, depending on your stupidity) and the friend at fb will submit an application for you to be verified. Hopefully it will be approved.
"someone working at facebook" probably isn't an employee, most likely anything requiring case by case human discretion is a contractor position that pays shit.
On the other hand, this seems like a way to legitimately take your instagram career to the next level! Networking is about who you know, not about how many people you know. Knowing a Facebook verification contractor is some pretty ironclad social proof.
Yeah, I was thinking the same: most human-scalable data entry ops, like application review, is farmed out to contractors.
That said, there's no guarantee that the contractor will be assigned your application to review. Assuming there are bribes, it likely would involve multiple people which increases it's chances of being revealed and less likely to actually be happening.
If your expenses equal or exceed your income, even at Facebook salary, an extra $3,000 can be crucial to keeping up the appearance of financial success.
It's pretty common for bribes to be pretty cheap compared to the gain. Same in DC. The ROI for lobbying is enormous. Spend a few million to get billions in subsidies or tax cuts.
Exactly and the simple reason why, which keeps these basic economics of bribery working so robustly, is the asymmetric measures of value/cost inherent to the two sides of the equation. A government or facebook employee or whomever who has access to some lever worth a great deal will sell access to it for these fairly small sums exactly because the much greater value isn't actually a cost to them. They're leveraging their access to someone elses resources for personal acquisition of a much smaller but to them worthwhile gain. You'd never convince a billionaire to sell you access to something of theirs worth billions by paying them only millions, but, like you said, you can easily convince a senator to give you access to billions in government resources (tax money) for a few million to their personal campaign.
Just today, I saw a a bunch of comments on an Insta page about selling blue ticks. I reported all of them as scam.
Would be interesting to see, if Instagram responds with the de-facto "Doesn't violate community guidelines".
Of course they will. I’ve flagged actually illegal content on Facebook and got that kind of response. I mean, there are card fraud groups operating on there right now and nasty teenagers flipping stolen bikes on Instagram Live so why am I even surprised?
It's a 100% true, I've seen some youtubers talk about all the nitty-gritty of the Instagram world and this was mentioned.
I wonder if it's just an employee filling in a form with their name on it or just some Dev flipping a bool on the backend though. If the former, it does sound risky if Facebook ever gets tired of the corruption and starts investigating.
Why do we call them influencers? Why not rat catchers or pied pipers or something. Because it feels like this story is going to end, the same way the one in Hamelin did.
I agree with your point but the pied piper actually initially solved the problem, was cheated and then came back to take revenge by abducting/drowning the children. So the parallel doesn't really hold.
What's interesting is that Facebook could easily clamp down on this: they certainly have the tools to monitor their network for "fake" accounts and identify activity by pools.
Why wouldn't they? Are they counting this manufactured engagement in the figures they use to sell advertisements?
It is much easier to measure amount of scam than detect. That means that company can report "cleaned up numbers" (at least with error bars) but not able distinguish all bad stuff from good stuff.
til that con-man means confidence man as in the past people where foolish enough to trust people confident to be their friends and then asked for their watches (surprisingly they trusted) and thus stealing them.
The role of easy travel (Mississippi steamboat in Melville's tale), or communications (mail, newspapers, telegraph, telephone, Intenet, ...), is also notable.
The Greek god Hermes (Mercury) represented travel, messengers, and tricksters. I find this interesting.
The meritocracy was always a sham. The "natural aristocracy of talent" is just an attempt to gaslight those cut out of the opportunities so that they will acquiesce to their exploitation.
It depends on how one defines merit and natrual. Meritocracy technically only needs ability to determine - with no regard to fairness, potential, or optimality in how the ability is obtained.
It is immaterial if the interutero cannibal shark that wins because it developed first and the consummed would have been stronger it is still the sole survivor.
Actual aristocrats were better at fighting as they could afford the diet, equipment, and to train from birth essentially. They had advantages but martial abilities still ultimately provided the limit. No money or royal blood could save chevaliers from changes like establishment of pike formations, or armor piercing crossbows on the battlefield, let alone guns no matter how much they cried foul about honor.
Ultimately they were part of a high value specialist-low value generalist cycle like how professional weavers did better than just any peasant in a cottage but worse than factories designed by more educated engineers but staffed with unskilled factory workers who in turn may be displaced by increased automation or cheaper labor elsewhere.
So their surviving descendants "administratized" and had others do the fighting more while they ruled through other means.
See also "How I Eat for Free in NYC Using Python, Automation, AI, and Instagram"[0] for an indication as to how "easy" it is to write an algorithmic social media "influencer" with 25K followers.
I thought this was going to be an essential part of this article, but it seems like IEO (Instagram Engine Optimization) is actually technically boring and scammy, whereas automated IEO- while still scammy- is technically interesting!
Sounds like it can take a lot of money and effort to become a winner at the game of Instagram. The system has rules; you have to know them and play them in order to win. Other players know the rules too, and you know that they know that, so fun second order effects exist. I can see why it could be fun, competing with other players. Trying to keep up with whatever kind of picture (and legend behind it, I expect) scores highly, but presumably knowing that the only way to break ahead of the pack would be to take a risk on something a little bit different and win with it. Gambles and game theory and so on.
Instagram isn't something that "matters", though. Is it? Does it matter how this game is played and how the winners are picked? Surely the only ethical issue is people playing who don't realise what the rules are; people who think they're playing a different game based on this "organic" growth the article discusses, so is the answer just to make sure that everyone who plays knows that's not the game anymore? The game has changed; we might as well get angry that Starcraft bouts today bear little resemblance to the slow fumblings that were seen during the first weekend on Battle.Net after Starcraft's release in 1998.
Do the players need to pretend that the game is still the organic game? Maybe that's part of it; there's an audience of judges who aren't playing but give points for "authenticity", I expect. But ultimately, this is a meaningless game some people like to play; the only harm (apart from people getting so into playing the game that they take it too seriously and damage their lives, but that's true of every game) I can see comes when people think they're playing a different game, but we just need to make the game clear up front.
I am way out of touch. The last online game I played with any dedication was probably Counterstrike, back when it was an 8MB alpha mod for HL (I think I've still got that executable on a CD somewhere, if it hasn't flaked with time). I never did Myspace or Facebook or any of the others, but Instagram just seems like a sharper distillation of the games that they became.
> Instagram isn't something that "matters", though. Is it?
I think that depends on what you count as important. It's pretty safe to assume that this sort of thing happens in every social media where people can monetize. Social media requires a certain amount of social trust to thrive, so if the health of social media generally is important to to you, this matters even if you don't use Instagram specifically.
Personally, this sort of thing is one of the (but certainly not the biggest) reasons why I avoid all social media like the plague.
It does matter, because "winning" at IG means you have an audience. Audiences can and will be monetized. I don't think this is that hard to see.
The reason so many people go so hard on the Instagram game isn't just to make themselves feel good or validated, it's because when you have 400,000 people watching your stories every day a lot of people will pay you to wear their gear while you do it.
Oh sure, ok, money. I didn't really think of that; it's all well out of my context. It's like sports. It matters like sports matter; for most people just a bit of fun, and for people really good at it, some money. It matters on an individual level for people who like it or make a living at it.
The social media platforms benefit out of this situation.
What surprises me is how similar the recommendations are when I borrow someone else's computer in a different geographical location to do some testing or want to use YouTube to look up how to do something. In these scenarios I am on a different operating system, differently gendered to normal, possibly in a borrowed account or in incognito mode. Yet I get the same lowest common denominator stuff that I get at home, logged in and with a particular history. I come away wondering how tailored those recommendations actually are.
Of course they are not that tailored at all. Unless I specifically look for something whatever get recommended is going to be from a quite narrow selection. If I start out looking for a particular topic then the recommended stuff will steer me back to the same froth that everyone else gets.
If I was a paranoid person I would assume that the social media giants were especially good at tracking me. But no, I have been tricked into believing recommendations are more tailored than they actually are.
So why does this suit the social media companies? Well Google/Youtube is probably the case in point. Shifting those videos around costs bandwidth. They have had boxes in the telcos before now, they might as well be a virtual update to Blockbusters and only have the general small selection and not every single option, that will do for most people most of the time. Or like libraries in the olden days where you could put in a special order for any book to borrow but the local library just had a few hundred kiddies books, a few hundred books in big print for the old folks and a few reference works.
There was a story on here today about how Google search results are skimping on showing us everything. I actually had not been able to find a former co-worker recently, and, thanks to the article comments I went on DDG and was able to find him.
So we have a subset of information going on, the same influencers, the same search results, the same videos, this also becomes a corpus of information we rely on and, the more we rely on it, anything outside of the expected becomes alien and rejected by us. It is like eating the same food every day, variety that was once the spice of life doesn't sit well.
Special knowledge is always special knowledge though. The really good stuff has few if any likes/views/reads. It is there for people who take the path required to get there. It matters not what the medium is.
This is what honestly terrifies me more than anything - being in a dire enough financial situation to need to do bullshit work and waste my short time on this Earth for food and shelter. In my experience meaningful jobs are in insanely high demand - they substantially underpay, require substantially more qualifications, and are much more scarce than adding another cog to the cancer of finance, advertising, or business service.
All these products have a beginning, a middle and an end.
As more and more people clamber on board the whole thing becomes top heavy and collapses under its own weight. Hard to imagine how invasive and fake future mass platforms will be like though...
The house always wins despite running a 'free' platform for people to load their content into...
No. I follow a lot of blogs and feel the same way about most of them as I do about HN. I do not feel that way about truly high-quality blogs. By the way, RSS is the best thing ever.
I also use IRC whenever I have some question or need help with something and it's great. I never feel my time spent on IRC is a waste, but my usage of it is quite focused and I don't hang out in rooms compulsively like I do on HN.
Uh, did you intend to misspell that, just to drive home the point? Or did you actually make a grammatical mistake, while calling out another poster's grammatical mistake, who was him- or her- self calling out yet a third person's grammatical mistakes?
As a nine-year old, I watched commercials on our black and white TV showing famous baseball players claiming they "smoked Camels." I knew then that smoking was dangerous, and that it was unlikely that the players "smoked Camels," either. So I don't get this influencer crap. I mean I really do not get it.
along with female ig influencers shilling brands/creating their own (i can count a couple girls i know making bikini brands), so many ig influencers push juuls/vape pens
I don't think the intentional is to get people to smoke who otherwise wouldn't. It's to get the people who are going to buy cigarettes, and in doing so, chose their brand. When confronted with many choices of competing products, having someone you trust and admire favour a particular product may be enough to tip the scales and get you to take that option.
I find myself doing this often, due to all the podcast ads I hear! If I'm going to buy a mattress or printed framed picture I'm going to start with I've heard about from some "influencer" I follow.
I guess because we "follow" people who interest us or are like minded. I don't set out to "follow an influencer", but when I subscribe to a podcast, or follow someone on twitter because I find their comedy hilarious; that's what I'm doing.
And yet you still remember Camel cigarettes, despite the fact that their ads haven't been aired in half a century.
Most advertising isn't designed to force you to buy, that's not how people behave. Ads are about establishing name recognition first, then nudging you one small step at a time towards a purchase.
The use of the term "merit" in this context feels fraught with issue.
One could say that, almost by definition, the individual with the most ability to game the system has the highest merit.
If a poker player is able to read the opponents' faces where no-one else can - they win based on merit. The losers may well disclaim this as being some sort of 'hack'.
We are speaking here about some pictures on a small, rectangular screen held in the hand.
My impression is that who’s interested in this sort of service is something like small start up fashion brands that can’t afford an actual celebrity.
My brother makes independent video games, at one point he was approached by someone who offered to broker deal with Twitch streamers to promote one of his games.
How real the popularity of these streamers really was, effects whether this might have been a good idea or not.
Whether that evokes your sympathy or not, I guess the moral of the story, of you’re in the market for purchasing influencer services, buyer beware
The streamers seem to be some of the more honest "influencers" acting as entertainers. At least ones I follow (there are many subgroupings within) will disclose if they have any special connections or contractual obligations (can't show this cutscene or boss fight prerelease), sponsorships, or even if they just received a free copy.
I would advise treating unaffiliated middlemen as scammers like those offering jobs for money. (If there is some affiliated group of streamers and they handle communications that is fine.)
If you want cheap marketing releasing some free copies generate no to marginal expenses.
It is respectful to all involved - you are giving away a few potential sales in exchange for a potential larger market, they can give it a fair shake and let people know what they think.
The viral effect can be real but it seems to depend on its own merits even if the "merit" is a gimmick like being hillariously glitchy.
I stopped reading when the author complained about being able to "buy reposts and shout outs from feature accounts and influencers." Isn't that exactly what being an influencer means: people paying for shoutouts? So it's ok when you're getting paid, but it's fraud when you're paying someone else for the shoutout?
Based off this definition of merit, any system would be meritocratic. A politician winning elections by purchasing votes wouldn't be considered to be merit based.
In poker, reading tells is an accepted part of the game and within the rules. It's my understanding that most of the tactics reported in the article are against Instagram's rules.
Which is also what I'm hearing from the article. "I've done it, but now I've stopped doing it, and everybody who still does it is bad and cheating". Sounds like "yeah, market manipulation is terrible and evil, and now that I've made my millions from doing it, we should all stop" to me.
I think you could look at the value of an influencer as providing an aesthetic, much like an artist, but the kicker is that the influencer is driving ads and is part of a consumerist architecture. While true art is nourishing, influencing is about depriving someone of contentment by making them want something they don't have.
I also think when we see people who are paid a lot, we want to like them, and feel as though they are contributing proportional to their pay. We want to know that they're working hard, and making a difference on society, not just for themselves, in a positive way.
The influencer culture is weird, and I would feel weird making so much money essentially being an ad-person.
I was just skimming, but did anyone else get the impression this guy was actually trying to teach people how to cheat, with the complaining tone just for deniability?
The OP is suggesting that some "influencers" who get paid to say/show they like something on instagram are "fake" because... they mislead the people who pay them about how many 'followers' they have?
But other people are more "authentically" doing paid product placement, still without necessarily disclosing that to those they "influence"?
I am unimpressed.
It sounds like they're saying that only some people truly have earned the right to get rich scamming the rubes.
Ah, the old “poseurs” trope. It’s all fake and all about superficial selling of an image. I’m not sure if a new poser is any worse than a legacy influencer.
I think it’s about them misleading the advertisers; which is actually fraud. I know a guy who bought 50k followers for a few hundred bucks and uses it to get free shit when he travels. I seriously doubt he’s the only one doing this.
Are you though? It's your job to find the right "influencer" and make sure that they can deliver what you're after. If you're unsure about the realness of their followers, just put some form of tracking into the contract. For every 100 clicks on the link, they get whatever money.
If all you look at are follower counts and then throw your money at them, you're just bad at your job.
Can't imagine this is going to be my most popular comment but... the first thing I did was Google for one of the services she's complaining about and give them $35 for one of the things she's complaining about. If it works, I'll pump more money into it.
I've spent about $1,200 so far building an Instagram following -- albeit it's quite small. I'm shooting for 5,000 real, engaged followers, and willing to spend $5,000 getting it. I think it will be an asset that will easily throw off more than $5,000 of value for me. We'll see!
210 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadOne reason why people don't trust experts is that they see fake experts like Cokie Roberts and Jim Cramer on TV all day.
Edit: To a degree, yes. Infomercials were wildly successful. But were there other ways?
https://ncase.me/trust
Maybe add a bad Photoshop image if you're feeling creative.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/liars-tale-a-history-of-false...
This is interesting if true
On the other hand, this seems like a way to legitimately take your instagram career to the next level! Networking is about who you know, not about how many people you know. Knowing a Facebook verification contractor is some pretty ironclad social proof.
That said, there's no guarantee that the contractor will be assigned your application to review. Assuming there are bribes, it likely would involve multiple people which increases it's chances of being revealed and less likely to actually be happening.
I wonder if it's just an employee filling in a form with their name on it or just some Dev flipping a bool on the backend though. If the former, it does sound risky if Facebook ever gets tired of the corruption and starts investigating.
Why wouldn't they? Are they counting this manufactured engagement in the figures they use to sell advertisements?
At most this is a conversation about how IG is enabling bad behaviour, but it's not quite end of the world territory.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/liars-tale-a-history-of-false...
Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man : His Masquerade
https://www.worldcat.org/title/confidence-man-his-masquerade...
The role of easy travel (Mississippi steamboat in Melville's tale), or communications (mail, newspapers, telegraph, telephone, Intenet, ...), is also notable.
The Greek god Hermes (Mercury) represented travel, messengers, and tricksters. I find this interesting.
It is immaterial if the interutero cannibal shark that wins because it developed first and the consummed would have been stronger it is still the sole survivor.
Actual aristocrats were better at fighting as they could afford the diet, equipment, and to train from birth essentially. They had advantages but martial abilities still ultimately provided the limit. No money or royal blood could save chevaliers from changes like establishment of pike formations, or armor piercing crossbows on the battlefield, let alone guns no matter how much they cried foul about honor.
Ultimately they were part of a high value specialist-low value generalist cycle like how professional weavers did better than just any peasant in a cottage but worse than factories designed by more educated engineers but staffed with unskilled factory workers who in turn may be displaced by increased automation or cheaper labor elsewhere.
So their surviving descendants "administratized" and had others do the fighting more while they ruled through other means.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19554425
Instagram isn't something that "matters", though. Is it? Does it matter how this game is played and how the winners are picked? Surely the only ethical issue is people playing who don't realise what the rules are; people who think they're playing a different game based on this "organic" growth the article discusses, so is the answer just to make sure that everyone who plays knows that's not the game anymore? The game has changed; we might as well get angry that Starcraft bouts today bear little resemblance to the slow fumblings that were seen during the first weekend on Battle.Net after Starcraft's release in 1998.
Do the players need to pretend that the game is still the organic game? Maybe that's part of it; there's an audience of judges who aren't playing but give points for "authenticity", I expect. But ultimately, this is a meaningless game some people like to play; the only harm (apart from people getting so into playing the game that they take it too seriously and damage their lives, but that's true of every game) I can see comes when people think they're playing a different game, but we just need to make the game clear up front.
I am way out of touch. The last online game I played with any dedication was probably Counterstrike, back when it was an 8MB alpha mod for HL (I think I've still got that executable on a CD somewhere, if it hasn't flaked with time). I never did Myspace or Facebook or any of the others, but Instagram just seems like a sharper distillation of the games that they became.
I think that depends on what you count as important. It's pretty safe to assume that this sort of thing happens in every social media where people can monetize. Social media requires a certain amount of social trust to thrive, so if the health of social media generally is important to to you, this matters even if you don't use Instagram specifically.
Personally, this sort of thing is one of the (but certainly not the biggest) reasons why I avoid all social media like the plague.
The reason so many people go so hard on the Instagram game isn't just to make themselves feel good or validated, it's because when you have 400,000 people watching your stories every day a lot of people will pay you to wear their gear while you do it.
What surprises me is how similar the recommendations are when I borrow someone else's computer in a different geographical location to do some testing or want to use YouTube to look up how to do something. In these scenarios I am on a different operating system, differently gendered to normal, possibly in a borrowed account or in incognito mode. Yet I get the same lowest common denominator stuff that I get at home, logged in and with a particular history. I come away wondering how tailored those recommendations actually are.
Of course they are not that tailored at all. Unless I specifically look for something whatever get recommended is going to be from a quite narrow selection. If I start out looking for a particular topic then the recommended stuff will steer me back to the same froth that everyone else gets.
If I was a paranoid person I would assume that the social media giants were especially good at tracking me. But no, I have been tricked into believing recommendations are more tailored than they actually are.
So why does this suit the social media companies? Well Google/Youtube is probably the case in point. Shifting those videos around costs bandwidth. They have had boxes in the telcos before now, they might as well be a virtual update to Blockbusters and only have the general small selection and not every single option, that will do for most people most of the time. Or like libraries in the olden days where you could put in a special order for any book to borrow but the local library just had a few hundred kiddies books, a few hundred books in big print for the old folks and a few reference works.
There was a story on here today about how Google search results are skimping on showing us everything. I actually had not been able to find a former co-worker recently, and, thanks to the article comments I went on DDG and was able to find him.
So we have a subset of information going on, the same influencers, the same search results, the same videos, this also becomes a corpus of information we rely on and, the more we rely on it, anything outside of the expected becomes alien and rejected by us. It is like eating the same food every day, variety that was once the spice of life doesn't sit well.
Special knowledge is always special knowledge though. The really good stuff has few if any likes/views/reads. It is there for people who take the path required to get there. It matters not what the medium is.
What a miserable feeling, chasing numbers, producing and contributing nothing real to humanity.
I bet it is better for happiness and mental health to stay away from all that.
Yeah. This isn't exclusive to social media influencers, though.
Are not most modern jobs like this?
You just described 80% of financial services...
The question is more why so many people decide to follow those shallow meaningless things...
http://behindthequest.com/about/
other than that, I welcome our new startup investiment sentiment data harvesting overlords.
I also use IRC whenever I have some question or need help with something and it's great. I never feel my time spent on IRC is a waste, but my usage of it is quite focused and I don't hang out in rooms compulsively like I do on HN.
HN has almost nothing in common with Instagram and Facebook.
Your being facetious, right?
Uh, did you intend to misspell that, just to drive home the point? Or did you actually make a grammatical mistake, while calling out another poster's grammatical mistake, who was him- or her- self calling out yet a third person's grammatical mistakes?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
And as someone constantly betrayed by my Android soft-keyboard, I've considerable sympathy.
Bullshit, cheat. Cheat blatantly. If there's a broken obvious but unintended way to accomplish your goal do it.
Otherwise one of the other billions of meatsacks roaming around the planet will do it first. Then they'll be eating your lunch.
I find myself doing this often, due to all the podcast ads I hear! If I'm going to buy a mattress or printed framed picture I'm going to start with I've heard about from some "influencer" I follow.
Most advertising isn't designed to force you to buy, that's not how people behave. Ads are about establishing name recognition first, then nudging you one small step at a time towards a purchase.
One could say that, almost by definition, the individual with the most ability to game the system has the highest merit.
If a poker player is able to read the opponents' faces where no-one else can - they win based on merit. The losers may well disclaim this as being some sort of 'hack'.
We are speaking here about some pictures on a small, rectangular screen held in the hand.
My impression is that who’s interested in this sort of service is something like small start up fashion brands that can’t afford an actual celebrity.
My brother makes independent video games, at one point he was approached by someone who offered to broker deal with Twitch streamers to promote one of his games.
How real the popularity of these streamers really was, effects whether this might have been a good idea or not.
Whether that evokes your sympathy or not, I guess the moral of the story, of you’re in the market for purchasing influencer services, buyer beware
I would advise treating unaffiliated middlemen as scammers like those offering jobs for money. (If there is some affiliated group of streamers and they handle communications that is fine.) If you want cheap marketing releasing some free copies generate no to marginal expenses.
It is respectful to all involved - you are giving away a few potential sales in exchange for a potential larger market, they can give it a fair shake and let people know what they think.
The viral effect can be real but it seems to depend on its own merits even if the "merit" is a gimmick like being hillariously glitchy.
In poker, reading tells is an accepted part of the game and within the rules. It's my understanding that most of the tactics reported in the article are against Instagram's rules.
You seem to be arguing that there is no such thing as cheating unless you get caught.
I also think when we see people who are paid a lot, we want to like them, and feel as though they are contributing proportional to their pay. We want to know that they're working hard, and making a difference on society, not just for themselves, in a positive way.
The influencer culture is weird, and I would feel weird making so much money essentially being an ad-person.
Ok then.
But other people are more "authentically" doing paid product placement, still without necessarily disclosing that to those they "influence"?
I am unimpressed.
It sounds like they're saying that only some people truly have earned the right to get rich scamming the rubes.
If all you look at are follower counts and then throw your money at them, you're just bad at your job.
I've spent about $1,200 so far building an Instagram following -- albeit it's quite small. I'm shooting for 5,000 real, engaged followers, and willing to spend $5,000 getting it. I think it will be an asset that will easily throw off more than $5,000 of value for me. We'll see!