Entertainers are supposed to be entertaining though.
These people have all the “entertainment” value of a late-night infomercial at best. “Oooh, watch me get excited about unboxing this item. Whatever could have Disney sent me this week?”
The worst problem is that these influencers do gain huge amounts of followers, but rarely fact-check or do hard sciences needed to ya know, give information to viewers? See Linus Tech Tips and the whole crap they’re into right now.
If you were objectively correct and that folks didn’t find them entertaining, there wouldn’t be the industry and they wouldn’t have their followers. It’s the same phenomenon that makes reality TV such a big money maker.
Reality TV is a money maker because you barely need any writers.
Reality TV was a reaction to the (repeated) writers strikes. Content, no matter the quality, sells eyeballs. Quality almost doesn’t matter in practice. As such, shitty TV that is poorly written makes money because their costs are so low. Not necessarily because people find them entertaining.
They’re the McDonalds of Hollywood. Low effort, low cost content designed to fill up televisions but keep audiences with “something” between the major shows people watch.
And no. Reality TV isn’t “real” either, its just unscripted, low effort television. Its roughly WWE where characters (and their actors) are given much leeway into the shots / script because they don’t want to pay real writers to make an actual script.
It has a lot of eyeballs. That’s the whole point. They were extremely popular shows. I don’t understand how you’re just swiping that part under the rug as if it didn’t matter. If no one watched them, they’d stop. They watch them because many people found it entertaining to watch. I can’t believe you’re trying to create a conspiracy that a bunch of people watched a show because they… didn’t enjoy it?
Most of the producers who craft reality TV story lines are not affiliated with a union and will not be affected by a strike. The genre also tends to be cheaper and less time-consuming to produce than scripted TV, making it an ideal alternative during past work stoppages.
Hardly a conspiracy theory. Reality TV is about cheapness, getting non-union work, fewer writers (or even no writers at all), and having far cheaper production.
I mean, they're mostly indie and could probably easily be compared to stand-up comedians.
Which if we look at it's history is a very crash-and-burn career itself. I think a lot of them are entertaining. But it's certainly a saturated market where it can feel like a needle in a haystack at times.
And really, the issue with LTT, is an issue. But keep in mind on the internet we largely mock news sites in general for being uninformative and many being glorified blogs. It's not as uncommon as we unfortunately may think.
But basically a lot of what is souring you on influencers, either has already happened in other careers or is currently happening to others as well, just we don't think about it as much.
Well “entertaining” is subjective. If these people weren’t entertaining, they wouldn’t have so many followers.
There are absolutely a ton of people out there taking advantage of certain people and manipulating them as opposed to actually being entertaining, but that’s not an “influencer” problem, that’s just a people problem. That happens in every industry with human interaction.
Plenty of influencers just post content they think their followers will like and use that following to make money as well. And a lot of the time, their followers actually enjoy the things they advertise.
And the great thing is if you don’t like the concept, you can just not follow them.
It’s a double edged sword. I do like some of the niche content the industry has created. I like coffee and I get a lot of indepth coffee analysis from folks who likely wouldn’t be able to spend the time doing so if they needed “real” jobs. I think it’s the ones where there’s no actual valuable content that is what gets people annoyed. I don’t understand how someone can just play video games in front of a camera. Or where they’re famous for their personality.
It’s great that they have that. But man it got abused so easily, and it felt kind of silly that you could actually block it. I remember getting it after saying the most middest of takes.
Absolutely, I post much more here because I know actual people will actually read it and may actually respond like they would to an actual human. It’s like the old days of the internet.
for me, I was motivated to make this my first post because I want to help solve the death of content issue we still have. it's gotten quite a lot of attention. I think that anywhere bigger, anything of relevance would have already been posted by the time I see it
You bring up one advantage I see from Lemmy. Even though I’ve seen this article posted before (I think by L4Sbot in this technology community), the nature of de-centralized content means that cross-posting onto various servers is actually encouraged to get input from a variety of users from different communities and configs (for example, people who have disabled viewing bot-account posts).
On Reddit, people would be quick to say “boooooo repoooost”, but I’ve not seen that too much of that, just a few complaints of “there’s too much orange guy and muskrat in my feed”.
Also, for me, it's the fact I do not feel my data and privacy are being siphoned, sold, and fingerprinted on this platform. Another factor is that I feel the people and interactions are pure and authentic, rather than astroturfed and ambiguous. That may change as the fedicerse grows, but for now it is bringing me back of the older days of the internet.
The absence of a running karma total is a surprisingly powerful difference. I do still look back at old posts, and it’s nice when there’s votes, but without the little number next to a name or when I mouse-over a profile, there’s no motivation to be the first in a thread to repost a cliche joke or to ragebait for fake internet points.
I think that on some bots it is meant as feedback on its performance but to have 10 users give the same feedback is kinda annoying. Maybe Lemmy can have a feature were humans can approve/disapprove bot performance that doesn’t involve upvote/downvote. It would only be available to bot accounts in the site’s UI. Could possibly expand it’s functionality to something more useful. Or just use the voting system because it’s already in place.
There used to be a bot rating bot on reddit that used those comments to see which bots where actually good. It was useful. I’m hoping someone will make the same on lemmy and go back retroactively to index old comments.
I think the “not having to be first” is what is so powerful.
I know that if I comment on a post from a few days ago on a populated community, I’ll likely at least get a reply from OP, if not a bunch of other people finding my comment and replying as well.
It’s like Lemmy is the nice, small-town version of Reddit (which is probably more similar to Gary Indiana).
Lemmy definitely has a more chill, human vibe than I got with Reddit, given how overrun the latter was with vast armies of shills, bots, alt right trolls, etc.
Not that it’s all rainbow-pooping unicorns frolicking through flowery meadows here but at least the dick comments tend to be much rarer and often a one off for the person making them.
Profiles are rarely accurate. I viewed the same profile from two different instances (yes the same profile, not the same username from two different instances) and they didn’t even have the age of thr account the same. One was 2 years, one was 2 months. So I wouldn’t trust that. I’d only trust it if you’re logged into that very instance.
I comment about as much as I did on reddit, but I feel like I see less negative replies. It doesn’t seem to matter what I’d post on there, somebody somewhere would have something shitty to say. It’s not my fault society can’t accept my seal clubbing hobby.
See? This is what people in reddit can’t seem to understand. I say, “I want to go the Arctic and club the shit out some Seal,” and they immediately assume the worst. Just because I like dancing the night away in cold, barren wastelands doesn’t make me a monster.
Hey me too! Just the Lemmy side (was never into twitters whole thing) but I actually post stuff here, even if it’s just cross posting.
I always used an alt to post on Reddit and did so very infrequently. I think I posted maybe 3 things on the 4 years on Reddit?
I comment a lot more, and have posted a ton more (even without removing the posts! And yea, 5 is a ton more since it’s in the last 2 months rather than 4years!)
I don’t even clear my comment history as a compulsive thing (I changed me behavior somewhat, to allow for this) because I don’t want to remove activity from the platform. I know it needs me to contribute so I do!
Part of the reason is Lemmy’s default sorting algorithm for comments, “Hot”, addresses reddit’s biggest flaw, which is that earlier comments snowballs with upvotes, so it buries late-comers to conversations, leading to the rat-race of everyone trying to get their funny one-liners in as early as possible for maximum karma (which also isn’t a thing here.)
The “Active” default sort for posts also means that comments are a lot more concentrated to what people are actually talking about and posts tend to be stickier. (also, botting upvote is a lot harder on Lemmy, since it’s easy to bot upvotes, it’s a lot harder to fake real conversations in comments. )
In fact, it is pointless to comment at all past like 4 hours on any post on reddit since it will just sit unread for hours, but here you can comment 1 day after a post and still have people talking to you.
Hey, I take offense to that! I’m going to write a vitriolic response to your seemingly-normal-but-different-viewpoint-than-mine opinion where I’ll use non-applicable slurs and misinformation and then call you dumb if you post a sensible reply!
Hey, I take offence to your office! I’m going to write a nonsensical response that parallels your comment where I’ll use no sources and not really make any point whatsoever!
tfw you just stand on the sides and then meme on what’s happening with a lame joke instead of contributing your two cents on the socioeconomic practices that are happening in the US that are currently choking its working class to death
The three things cited in the post summary? Never been on them. I never ever heard of one of them. It seems to me that it’s more that these few platforms are struggling, and other (twitter/x, reddit, facebook, and other) just keep sailing smoothly.
I’ve never been on tiktok and instagram. I never heard of BeReal. I said I never heard of one of them; although my grammar is probably bad now that I read that again.
I presumed they were joking. I am unsure about the slash ess rule anymore, but I think folks are spotty about its useage here. Sorta hafta take a comment with a grain of salt.
BeReal was a neat idea, you’d get a random notification with a short timer asking to show both cameras. It was meant to cut down on manufactured posting - the random notification to try catch you in more boring times, and the short timer to stop you prettying yourself up.
I guess it was trying to be a more authentic social media, but maybe that doesn’t appeal to the Instagram generation.
It’s kinda niche, but it’s where you and your friends can only post once a day at a random time. But it’s all at the same time, so you kinda get a slice of life of what everyone is doing. I like it, it’s much worse for influencer type stuff, so everyone I know just uses it with their friends which is nice. It starts conversations that might not happen otherwise.
I’m not sure I understand the concept. So the app chooses a random time of day to send an alert, at which point everyone in a group gets to post whatever they want? When the window ends then there are no more posts until the next day? Are you in the groups with the kids?
You’re allowed to post later, though this will be visible with your post. Tbh I like it until now. It’s a good way to engage with my friends now that I only see them a few times a month. The friends I have on BeReal are generally respecting the rule that you either post at the moment BeReal asks you to or at the nearest moment where it’s okay to so. I won’t post at work, at the toilet, or in the shower or something. But I will do so after those moments of I’m doing something mundane like washing the dishes or cycling home. You’ll generally just get a sense of what your friends’ life’s like like normally, as well as the fun things they do like traveling or visiting some event.
Same with ChatGPT I show them how to use it as a tutor, instead of a homework solving machine. Other teachers “ban” it. They’re the same people that would have resisted color television.
Wtf? ChatGPT gets things wrong way, way too often to trust it to “know” anything you don’t. Of course it depends on how niche the topic of information is, but I don’t ever trust it to definitely not be confidently incorrect.
That’s what I thought when I tried it last fall but it turns out that 99% of people live very boring lives or put very little effort into these no notice pictures. Browsing my feed was so dull, I lost interest quickly.
I know this conversation is had nearly daily here, but by fuck am I glad that the fediverse is so much less astroturfed than every other social media site.
we need to work on keeping it that way. we have the advantage with no corporations to silently manipulate us and we own the infrastructure, but we still gotta root out bot accounts and malicious instances
They are relentless! They will get here when it becomes meaningful enough. So yes I echo your sentiments that we need to do all we can to prepare for that day to defend this space.
I heard it used to have very solid ad management options. It was good for business too, as direct feedback/curation = more appropriate ads = more valuable ads. But i guess as algorithm shit and data harvesting “automated” the process it went downhill, and advertisers fleeing twitter post $8 checkmark was the coup de grace
The ads went out of control in like 2019 when the post 2015 social media boom started to cool. One of the knockoff effects of 2020 pandemic is it artificially extended the life of social media companies for like 2 years.
The funniest part of the musk buyout of twitter is the company would probably be doing very similar bullshit if he didnt buy them out, probably in a slightly more savvy way, but they’d still be dripping money.
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