[bell-cot]

THIS. Just how far into can’t-do-arithmetic self-delusion do you need to be, to believe that “you need X thousand followers to succeed financially” jobs could actually be available to more than a few people out of every X thousand???

[auggierose]

From a theoretical point of view, that is not a problem. Given a population of Y people, each of which are following X other people, you can get X as high as Y-1. Fan bases are not mutually exclusive, just like I can shop both at place A and B and sell stuff at my own store C.

[danbruc]

Sure, everyone can follow everyone, 8 billion people can each have 8 billion followers, but that also means that everyone can spend about 4 milliseconds per year on each one they are following. What really matters is the time and money you are spending and that is essentially a fixed amount which you can split into a few larger or many smaller contributions. If there are many evenly spread small contributions, then no one can make a living on that, if there are a few big and concentrated contributions, then only a few can make a living.

[theK]

Yeah but the size of those fan bases does have some practical upper bounds. Usually accounts follow a set of x people where x is in the hundreds whereas creators need to get to Y followers where Y is typically measured in a size orders of magnitude bigger than x. So you have a, practical, hard asymetry

[nlitened]

But you can’t reasonably shop at Y shops.

[ralusek]

It's actually a problem of time. Everyone on earth could follow everyone else. But you have 24hr in a day to fight for. You probably have about 5 hours of a heavy user's attention to fight for.

[KaoruAoiShiho]

Yeah but not everyone's trying to be an influencer, most people are still doctors, engineers, etc

[giraffe_lady]

Most people are still low wage or "gig economy" service workers. Which is a big part of why these escape-the-grind fantasies are popular and have been for generations. The problem is the world we've made not how people are trying to navigate it with hope in their hearts.

[metadat]

Perhaps you haven't already heard: Becoming an influencer is what a large portion of kids today dream of and fully expect to succeed at.

"The importance of school is secondary because I am easily going to become a rich and famous YouTuber or TikTokker."

Source: Many school teachers.