[TeMPOraL]

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.

[rowanG077]

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.

[jrochkind1]

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.

[com2kid]

> 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.

[TeMPOraL]

> 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?

[rowanG077]

Sure but that's not lying. Lying is not equal to saying something that is not true. Lies are deliberate.

[jrochkind1]

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.

— https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/disclosures-...

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.

Yeah, right. It is to laugh.

[rowanG077]

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.

[jrochkind1]

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.

[TeMPOraL]

> Lying is not equal to saying something that is not true. Lies are deliberate.

Yes. Being deliberate is what makes influencers liars, and not just misguided performers.

[cjf101]

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.

[DangitBobby]

Sales and marketing are not new.

[hbn]

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"

[tshaddox]

So then, celebrity endorsements? Those aren't new either.

[TeMPOraL]

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.

----

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

[tshaddox]

> 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.

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[lovich]

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

[TeMPOraL]

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.

----

[0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

[lovich]

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

[TeMPOraL]

> 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.

[Idiot211]

So basically they want to go into marketing?