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Comment by ggg2 | Hacker News Reader

"Anecdotally, I know multiple people who's tupperware parties count would..."

I am not talking trash about your point. Just that you replied to a comment with not much understand of multi level marketing (pyramid schems) that the previous comment was aluding to (and the commenter didn't expand on it either). Most people in the tech business do not have much exposure to it. But the success of things like herbalife, avon, etc rest on the "marketing reach potential" of their network, not just for the direct product.

so in a way you are confirming the similarity that you thought you were denying with your comment. And the great insight here is how "influencer" is a kind of organic-multilevel-marketing scam.

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Other than your suggestion that a "nano-influencer" is akin to MLM (in the whole up/down graph stuff, and pyramid nature), I don't see reason here to conclude that.

Small-to-medium brands engaging with small-to-medium scale individual marketers/influencers could be quite different than traditional MLM, with way fewer intermediaries.

The problem with MLMs was the predatory nature: having friends suck eachother into them to earn referrals, and most of the product being sold to people with dreams of getting rich with "cheap" and exclusive prices, who will in turn have a hard time finding actual customers to consume it.

The main differentiating factor is whether the "distributors" are the customers (as is the case with a lot of MLMs, around these days) and real sales to end customer only make up a small percentage of total sales. In those cases all the product ends up in garages and attics of the people who bought in and now can't sell because the product is overpriced shit and designed as such. That means the primary way to make sales is to recruit new "distributors" who then have to do the same (so, pyramid schemes).

However things like tupperware didn't seem to work that way, the product was actually mostly sold to end customers which makes it a legitimate business and not a pyramid scheme.

> ... of organic-multilevel-marketing scam.

Is it a scam though? A pyramid scam is self-similar: you sell to people who then expect to sell to people who expect to sell to people etc.

I thought Avon, Tupperware etc. had a fixed length chains and multi-decade track records of sales to real consumers at the end of the chain.

It's not a recursive scam, but some of them are still situations where they convince people to buy in before they understand the demand, and then in order to recoup their costs they now have to resort to obnoxious techniques like inviting their entire Facebook contacts list to their virtual party. I think the term "scam" is removing the resellers from responsibility for their own situation, so "sham" is a better term. Others aren't scams at all, but simply business that usually involve obnoxious techniques like inviting your entire Facebook contacts list to your virtual party.

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