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Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

> According to a poll released in 2019, some 54 percent of Americans between the ages of thirteen and thirty-eight would, if given the chance, become a social-media influencer. A whopping 23 percent believed that this term already fit them.

EDIT: Jesus, this article is the gift that keeps giving:

> Later, when I ask Chase [about the veracity of the video he] explains that the video must be legit because “it’s gotten deleted multiple times off the internet, which is insane.” Epistemologically, this is where we are as a country: when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness.

also the whole post apocalyptic vibe is lit:

> It is raining ash while we play basketball.

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> when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness.

The difficulty is that it can mean either it's true and the authorities don't want you to know it, or it's false and they don't want you to believe it. Judging information either way based only on it being censored leads to error of two different types. Neither is correct thinking but plenty of people make the opposite mistake of trusting authorities and I think we need both types if we're going to have either. A country full of conformist sheep of any sort would be at risk of some sort of totalitarianism or other political disaster.

> but plenty of people make the opposite mistake of trusting authorities

In almost 40 years, my heuristic of trusting the government and ignoring anything being sold to me as “THEY don’t want you to know this!!” has worked out really well for me.

And as FOIA and declassifications have shown, trusting the government doesn’t work out well for the country. Ignorance is bliss

Who do you think declassifies and releases information? Who do you think passed and enforces the Freedom of Information Act?

It might work if your government is trustworthy, but perhaps it's trustworthy because so many people challenge it so openly. Plenty of governments cover up embarrassing parts of their history, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Remember when the US government advised people not to wear masks for Covid and social media sites enforced restricting people from talking about it?

Remember when the US invaded Iraq because they saw a chemical weapons site with some kind of decontamination truck circling the yard?

Remember Edward Snowden showing that some spying that conspiracy theorists had believed turned out to be true?

Remember the Glomar Explorer?

Did you trust everything Trump said in his role as president when it conflicted with public opinion that said he was trying to hide something?

I came across this article a few weeks ago. The 23% number seems to be from this poll https://morningconsult.com/influencer-report-engaging-gen-z-...

The author is mistakenly adding the 12% and 11% numbers. The real proportion is around 12% of young people. Given that in the poll, "influencer" is used basically synonymously with "celebrity" (Will Smith is considered an influencer) I'd say this is pretty reasonable actually.

>Epistemologically, this is where we are as a country: when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness.

Its funny how oblivious pro-censorship people are to the nature, effects, and history of censorship

The tone of the article was something else. What a great writer. That sentence was equally impactful to me. The closing two sentences were as well.

I would love the source for this. It seems too ridiculous to be true unless they're using a non-standard definition of 'influencer'.

What is the standard definition of influencer? Is there some standard being set? And by what body?

The parent obviously means standard in the statistical sense not the bureaucratic sense.

The standard definition is more or less "someone who posts glamorous shots of themselves on social media to build an audience they can influence and then monetize". A non-standard definition would be one which most people would find misleading or not fitting for the term.

I also wonder what the poll looked like, I find it hard to believe people over 30 would want to become influencers unless it was worded something like "Would you like to make millions of dollars if it meant becoming an influencer?"

Don't overthink it. People read this question as, do you want people to give you money because you are popular? And they responded with a resounding, "I guess".

There isn't a "real" standard as per an international organization, but there is already an emergent consensus in marketing around tiers of influencers based on number of followers. For one instance: https://www.tribegroup.co/blog/influencer-followers

"Nano" influencers, according to this particular company, are people with 1000-3000 followers, Micro are 1,000-100,000, Macro are 100,000+, etc. Here's another example with slightly different values: https://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/social-media-influ...

Because this is now big business, I'd expect convergence on a common definition some time relatively soon.

It’s too simple to classify social media count at such small numbers in nano and too wide of an amount in micro.

Different social media apps and then non social media like blogs or podcasts all have different thresholds for what is considered “big”.

With smaller counts, usually if someone is following 4K and is followed by 3K, they aren’t any more “influential” than an active liked person with a couple hundred followers.

Still not perfect but looking at basic interaction metrics will help a lot more as well: likes/favs/bookmarks, reposts, replies/comments. There are overlapping metrics like embedded or referenced count outside the social media app itself. Add in trajectory, history especially to verify this isn’t a BS blip of bought interactions and followers.

Further than that, getting a general view of the cohort of followers like how many are active, how many have profile pics, how many are bots or only on to market their own stuff, etc

Why is this post grey?

Don't know, but putting numerical values on follower count is not likely to be that useful cross-platform due to differences in engagement level, demographics etc.

Agreed. Tik Tok users are worth less on average than other social media. It’s going to be both the social media platform and the niche you are in that affects money to be made. The amount of posting also matters.

This is not including the important and elusive count of true influence. The basic ways are usually like/bookmark, repost, replies/comments. An overlap can also be if your posts get referenced outside the social media network a lot too.

Counting a couple thousand followers as categorization is meaningless since they could be barely interacting to really interacting. And at such a small follower count, low interaction could mean someone with a couple hundred followers is more of an influencer in terms of literal influence than someone with 10x followers.

Probably influencers downvoting

Probably anyone who has more than a couple thousand followers and made $5 last year from youtube/instagram video profits considers themselves and influencer, and since there is no regulating body of the definition they wouldn't necessarily be wrong.

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