All Followers Are Fake Followers | Hacker News Reader

All Followers Are Fake Followers

theatlantic.com

73 pointsIntronExon36 comments

> The culprit is the numbers themselves, not the lies that augment them, nor the profits made in doing so. The only reason there can be a market, let alone a black market, for social-media engagement is because these services are marketplaces of attention, not of ideas, products, or services. That’s why Twitter counts followers, likes, retweets, and all the rest so prominently. If the numbers were less visible, or entirely hidden, everyone might live more meaningful, more productive lives online, using posts as means to ends rather than as circulations within the system.

Sorry, I haven't had my coffee this morning, but this reads as eloquent but blathering nonsense. What kind of marketplaces for ideas are there that don't intrinsically involve a competition for attention? Twitter is far from perfect but that doesn't mean that all the numbers that users accumulate are as fake as the author's own following.

There is something rich about someone turning up his nose toward the vanity of social media, while publishing his screed in a mass-market publication in which his byline comes attached with a resumé worthy blurb ("He is the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in media studies...His latest book is Play Anything) that links to his Twitter account.

And also, the opening paragraph is the height of privilege:

> In the summer of 2015, the game designer Bennett Foddy and I were sloshing down cocktails while waiting for prime dry-aged rib-eye steaks in Midtown Manhattan. We weren’t living large, exactly, but we did pause to assess our rising professional fortunes. Among them, both of us seemed to be blowing up on Twitter. “Where did all these followers come from?” I asked. We’d both added tens of thousands of apparent fans over the previous year or so...

> ...Even so, their effect was real: Foddy and I looked far more popular and important than our cronies. A colleague of Foddy’s at New York University, passed over by Twitter for such largesse, had become so agitated that he’d cornered Foddy to ask if he was buying followers. The whole matter was a Pandora’s box that I kept carefully hidden and firmly closed.

I don't mean the bit about chowing down on steaks in midtown Manhattan, but that the OP just seems to accept his placement on Twitter's recommended-follow list to be status quo or destiny or based on merit. He continues to muse about how he gets to keep his "phantom following" even after Twitter fixed its recommendation algorithm. If social media followings are as fake and meaningless as he tells everyone else it is, he doesn't provide a compelling reason why he hasn't shed his early largesse, which would be easy enough to do by deleting and then recreating his account.

> And also, the opening paragraph is the height of privilege:

> I don't mean the bit about chowing down on steaks in midtown Manhattan, but that the OP just seems to accept his placement on Twitter's recommended-follow list to be status quo or destiny or based on merit.

Actually, it's the opposite of privilege. The entire article is about fake followers being common amongst accounts.

There would still be competition for attention. If I want my ideas propagated, then I want lots of real people actively reading my tweets (or re-tweets of my tweets).

Fake followers do not read my tweets, and by and large nobody reads what they re-tweet. Their only use is to put a big # on my profile. Removing that prominent # only breaks twitter for bots.

It'd be neat if Twitter started not displaying the vanity metrics for awhile just to mess with people.

Ian Bogost is probably the worst regular contributor to The Atlantic and I say this as someone who probably agrees with his broader point at least half the time. Aside from having an insufferably pretentious writing style, he frequently cherry-picks examples or falls back to meaningless vagary when trying to support his sweeping proclamations or edgy contrarian assertions. I recommend reading just about anyone else.

His book “Racing The Beam” is very good, tho’

Most marketplaces for ideas do not intrinsically involve a competition for raw quantitative attention--i.e. a single metric like raw numbers of viewers or minutes of attention (or in the case of Twitter, followers or retweets).

Most marketplaces for ideas, historically, have measured success with a more complex function that also included qualitative assessments of who heard the idea, when they heard it, and what they did with it. For example classical music and jazz are never going to get as many listeners as popular music. That's not what success looks like. Going back a few hundred years, it didn't even really matter if the audience liked a piece of classical music, as long as the artist's patron did.

What is fake is the flattening of the metric of success for every single person or idea into the same 2 or 3 numbers.

The Atlantic is a pretty well-known magazine, sure, but it does not command nearly the aggregate attention that The Voice, a TV singing competition on NBC, does. But Twitter (and other social media platforms) invite us to directly compare the two without further context.

> The investor Mark Cuban called for a real-name policy on services like Twitter, arguing that “there needs to be a single human behind every individual account.” That’s a terrible idea: As the entrepreneur Anil Dash has argued, it would endanger marginalized people without improving trust.

I think there are a few fundamental cruxes of human society where there is no ideal solution because you have directly opposing and yet just forces pulling on it. This is one of them.

Secrecy is vital to allow good people to evade bad actors. But it's also harmful because it allows bad actors to hide from good people. Any system that ignores one side of this coin is going end up causing significant harm. Good systems that work with privacy need to be sophisticated and see both sides of it.

So soon, bots following bots while we tune in with a tired glance at what the bots are trending today — amusing ourselves to death.

This is solid gold. Thank you.

Ah, like watching Conway's Game of Life on a screensaver.

All Universal Statements Are Exaggerated Statements

The tendency of a closed system to maximum entropy is universal.

An object in motion will tend to remain in motion without the action of an external force.

Everyone dies eventually.

All humans have been born on Earth.

The last one is not like the others, in that it may change soon.

It may, hopefully, but for now it’s a universal statement which isn’t exaggeration.

I was trying to be cute and incorporate real universal statements into my sentence by suggesting that even "All Universal Statements Are Exaggerated Statements" itself is exaggerated ;)

...Oh. Please don’t let my overly literal reading and pissy reply indicate that you weren’t successful in your attempt. I am a goober.

I challenge your statement that "everyone dies eventually". I intend to live forever and so far, so good.

Forever is implausible given our current understanding of stellar evolution, and the ultimate fate of an expanding universe.

https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf

What does "lives" mean? Can we save conscience when approaching the cold death? What happens at the end of time?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question

I axed my Twitter profile, and I don't regret it. Originally I got it for professional development, but later realized that that is pretty silly, ultimately.

I'm happier when staying in reality, even if I amass less Internet Points in the meantime. Nothing really happens on Twitter, people just react endlessly to things. Plus, after having a kid, I find it hard to care about dumb adult stuff like 'professional influence' on social networks. If I want to get my ideas out, writing a blog post and working on projects that further those ideas is far more influential than Twitter ranting.

This is my own experience, I don't expect that it'd apply to everyone, but I found value in leaving.

Personal anecdote, as someone who has been on Twitter for 8+ years and is very active (80k+ Tweets) I've noticed that the bot follower spam is much better now that in the past.

  There’s a reason that a “hustle”
  is a synonym for a con or grift;
  once you’re hustling, it’s a
  foregone conclusion that you’ll
  bend the norms to achieve the
  gain they would otherwise
  prohibit.

Wait, what?

Edit: yes, I understand the many meanings of the word “hustle”. What I’m reacting to is the “forgone conclusion” that engaging in a side hustle will lead to bending norms, instead of, you know, “working really hard on the side.”

Author is projecting.

That said hustle refers to different things and they get conflated. Working tirelessly, and also street hustling are both hustling, but can result from different morals.

They're labeled with the same word precisely so that they can get conflated. Language is fuzzy, and this fuzziness is actually used as a feature in communication. If you want to talk about honorable hard work, you have plenty other words to pick from; when you say "hustle" to mean hard work, you accept the slight semantic nudge towards something shady, or bending the rules.

It's in the dictionary:

hustle noun

1 busy movement and activity: the hustle and bustle of the big cities.

2 [North American informal] a fraud or swindle.

Edit for your edit: The word 'hustle', I believe, nicely captures the author's attempted meaning: That people turning their hobbies into Etsy shops promoted with fake followers aren't running a well-organised criminal enterprise, but rather participating in a scheme where they tend to cut corners for rather low payout.

It's depressing to watch the Atlantic inexorably cross the event horizon into clickbait.

So, this article is in response to the NYTimes piece that came out 2(?) days ago; however there also seems to be chatter about Twitter being bought out[1] by Salesforce that has subsequently sent it's stock higher.

Are we seeing the press trying to knock Twitter down a few pegs as it seeks acquisition?

Hitting the company with a "your user base is fake and thus ain't worth as much as you think" would certainly have an affect IMO.

[1] http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/twitter-stock...

> Are we seeing the press trying to knock Twitter down a few pegs as it seeks acquisition?

"The press" doesn't work that way. In particular, I doubt that the NYT and The Atlantic take orders from Salesforce's M&A department.

And if you know Ian Bogost, the author of this article, you know he is not a shill of anything. He has a well known trajectory of being highly critical of... well, just about everything. But especially anything internet-related. I first became aware of Bogost when I read his article "Gamification is Bullshit", and he is also the author of "Cow Clicker", a spoof of Zynga's style of games -- both of which will give you an idea of what he stands for.

The simpler malevolent explanation is that they just want stuff to write about that will receive clicks.

It's _probably_ not a hit piece, but just relevant. [0] Something, something simplest explanation, something.

[0] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

The even simpler explanation is that Ian Bogost [1] has always been highly critical of social media, Twitter, Facebook, and everything gaming- and internet-related. No conspiracy to affect stock value here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Bogost

You're suggesting that an investigation that likely took months, if not more than a year, is actually just a stitch-up job to take down Twitter's stock value at the moment of acquisition?

edit: I'm referring to the NYT story, not the OP

All news is fake news.

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