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Comment by zakum1 | Hacker News Reader

How sustainable is this before it starts to destroy trust and integrity in the friendships between these kids. As an adult, I would not like my friends to be promoting products to me rather than expressing their real preferences and insights. How much more toxic is this in teenage years when relationship skills are being formed?

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They are not promoting to their friends. Most have different accounts for talking to friends. The accounts with 8 thousand, or 20 thousand, or 50 thousand followers are obviously not all close friends. They are people following the child's internet persona.

But what if you're a crappy social media maven and you HAVE conflated your fake friends and real friends?

What if you had no real friends at all...

Then you likely learn a tough lesson. This is called growing up.

Yeah: the account 'for friends' is called "frinsta" (or something) nowadays.

> Yeah: the account 'for friends' is called "frinsta" (or something) nowadays.

rinsta = real instagram = public, heavily managed to project an image, for acquaintances and others

finsta = fake instagram = private, informal, for real friends

https://thetechieguy.com/what-is-finsta-and-rinsta-and-why-d...

Welp, I feel old.

Don't worry buddy, my guess is 95% of us are in the same boat.

Plus, it's information with short-term relevance. Think Beanie Baby jargon. Does anyone really think "having an Insta" or knowing the vernacular is going to be relevant in 10 years? Any more relevant than knowing your way around MySpace is today?

Tangent:

When I was younger, I assumed that old (well, “old”, like 45) people couldn’t figure out how to use technology. So I’d roll my eyes as some adult seemed confused about Facebook or whatever.

Now that I’m aging out of the “young adult” category, I realized I had it wrong: I can still figure out how to use the new hot new social media app, I just don’t see why I should give a damn about any of it.

Those terms seem to mean the opposite of what they should. Shouldn't you be "real" with your friends, and "fake" with the public?

The sheer fact a 'rinsta' is "heavily managed to project an image" means that it is fake. I guess it's just another example of language evolving counter to logic and original meaning.

Maybe because it has your True Name, rather than a pseudonym to disclose to good friends?

The idea is that the fake account is known to be you by only a few people that you chose.

Who are these 20k people and why would they be interested in following an account being paid for promoting products in a very obvious way? Of course the ideas of advertisement aren’t lost on me and I can see how a product mentioned on Gruber’s blog or podcast would be somewhat persuading, but the difference is that Gruber seems to be curate and select advertisers he actually cares for and enjoys, products that are actually relevant to its audience. The sponsored content on instagram however looks rather random and open to any advertiser - I don’t see the appeal to the followers of said accounts. Maybe I’m just too narrow-minded.

It's MLM reinvented with more child labor.

Hardly, from what I understand. There's no initial financial outlay beyond phone, internet, and time - which they already have - and as far as I can tell there are no commitments or personality contracts. Will it last like this, though? I doubt it. I expect the near future will being middle-men driving down the already low prices and demanding increasingly more of the advertisers in terms of what they can and cannot post, who they are allowed to work with, etc.

But the analogy is still tempting. How much of the attention heaped upon influencers is coming from people who hope to get some back for their own rise to influencerdom? Still closer to plain old high-school popularity, but now with a dangling carrot of a career possibility.

This is not for friends at all. You have one account for these kinds of things and another one, often private, for real friends. Of course many of your friends follow both accounts but they understand very well it's a kind of job and, in general, are supportive. You're not selling things to them like in MLM.

Right, someone with 8,000 followers is not "friends" with all of them.

If it teaches kids to distrust by default what they see online then that would be a positive.

Blind trust in everything on the internet is equally as bad as assuming that everything from the greatest collection of human knowledge is a lie. Skepticism and critical evaluation are the skills that should be encouraged.

Eh, give the kids some credit. This is the modern equivalent of bringing candy from home and selling it at school. Kids these days are likely far better than you and I at sussing out a social media hustle.

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