Comment by noego | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noego | Hacker News Reader

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I have a hard time following what the author is trying to say exactly. As far as I can tell, he seems to be making 2 interwoven points, which have nothing to do with the clickbait title.

1. There are "fitness influencers" on instagram who are trying to build a career out of this

Ok. There are also software bloggers who are using their blogs to build up their tech careers. And startups who are using their blogs for marketing/PR purposes. I wouldn't go around accusing Robert Martin of being "full of shit" just because he wants to build a career out of the things he writes about.

2. There are some "fitness influencers" who haven't earned the credentials needed to be taken seriously

Sure, but that's the whole premise of social-networking platforms as opposed to traditional media. It seems a stretch to accuse everyone of being full of shit just because they chose to build their brand using social-media. What's next: "Everyone on the internet is full of shit"? "Everyone on Hacker News is full of shit"? "Everyone writing articles on random sites like MelMagazine is full of shit"?

Personally, this whole article reeks of clickbait and faux-outrage.

I feel like it would be more comparable to someone posting how x technology/framework/language will cure all your problems whilst the poster has never tried it, nor used it, potentially doesn't even understand it and is being paid to talk about it.

and keeps posting about working big FANG projects.

Anecdotally most of them are full of shit though. I have been around weight training a long time and so many of these people are little more than steroids, fake weights, and Photoshop. But they're more than willing to sell you their 'secret', which is always "eat good food, watch your calories, and lift weights."

> their 'secret', which is always "eat good food, watch your calories, and lift weights."

This is literally always the _secret_.

Yes, and it works! Just don't expect to look like a body builder.

So here was my take. Fitness influencing is a microcosm representative of the bigger picture on Instagram. IG is tailor made for advertising. It's visually sumptuous, low information density, one-to-many communication. Surfing IG doesn't engage the higher brain functions. It's all sentiment driven.

Marketers love that. So the platform has attracted people with marketing-oriented brains. So now we have this whole trend of influencers going on there, and basically just being marketers for one product or another, and making careers and businesses out of it. And IG is so good for that, that most of what you come across nowadays is turning out to be sponsored commercial content.

That's what I got from the article, and it's a great point, as multiple influencers actually say in the article, it's a great place to make posts that have commercial intent, but they don't even use social media, or consume Instagram, they just post their advertisements.

IG is basically becoming cable TV, one-way, minimal interactivity, people constantly pushing advertisements at you. All that's changed is some guy in a suit now assigns $X of his annual marketing budget to some roided up IG influencer and then gets on with his work day.

I'd love it if there was some platform where spending money actually reduces your reach, that's a platform I would use, specifically because it'd be a terrible tool for marketers.

Agree, I kept re-reading, and couldn't understand what was the article saying. It just tells about how there are fitness influencers and that they obviously make money off sponsored content.

The whole time, I thought it was going to say that they're not really fit at all, and are all mostly plastic surgery, implants and steroids, but not a single mention of that beyond the title and its accompanying illustration.

I also find #2 interesting. For fitness, unless your fake (which I thought the article was gonna discuss somewhat, but didn't), your creds are the photos and videos of your body and what you can do with it. That's mostly what people follow them for anyways.

I think steroids are the subtext of what motivated the author to write the article.

Except, 'look, these guys are all fairly obviously on steroids', is a tough thing to get past current journalistic standards

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