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Comment by Rjevski | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, the main lesson here is that you shouldn’t be paying 500$ to an illusionist.

That “Angie” whoever she is, is just a fraud. She’s not actually delivering any value. Whatever she’s pretending to earn could be all fake (it’s honestly not that difficult to fake these “perfect” photos and definitely doesn’t require to be a millionaire), and even if it’s real now, she’s gonna be the first one to get the door the second this social media/bullshit media bubble pops and brands realise it’s not worth it.

You want to make money? There are plenty of career paths that will make you good money by delivering actual value to your customers. Bragging on Instagram and getting virtual internet points isn’t one of them.

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I am not really an Instagram person, but I don't think you're right here. I think the value provided by Instagram today is basically that of glossy fashion and style magazines in the decades of yore. Some people like to look at pretty photos of pretty people wearing pretty things.

Except there were maybe 20 of those magazines where as now the barrier to entry is so easy that there's 20 million kids making these sorts of photos.

So? The same happened with text on the internet. Now everybody's a publisher. That seems like a good thing to me.

The problem here is that there’s a limited pool of consumers (and thus money) for this content.

It used to be that the aforementioned magazines were sufficient to fill that gap of the market; as a result they were making decent money, could put out decent content that people were happy with and didn’t have to resort to scammy behaviour to make profit.

Nowadays the floodgates are open and everyone is a wannabe “influencer” except the pool of consumers & money remained the same, so they now have to resort to less than acceptable techniques to try and make money, and this article is one of the possible outcomes.

Text on the internet has the same problem by the way - there’s now a shit ton of garbage content written only to gain clicks and attention without actually delivering any value to the reader.

Sure?

I agree that free distribution and approximately infinite supply have been a problem for many content businesses that based their businesses on scarcity. But as far as I can tell the topic here is whether Instagram content is valuable. It is. Many valuable things can be hard to monetize. E.g., air.

Dad?

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