Social media is damaging to society, doing things for likes is damaging for the ego, and curating your world for Instagram or TikTok likes is choosing to live in a simulacra.
No Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, WeiBo, or TikTok for me ~ just Hacker News. Upvote me here so I know you agree and we can influence others not to be influencers.
It's hard to understand in high school that the class structure in high school completely falls apart at graduation. But the class structure in college is more permanent.
That train of thought then makes me realize people who grew up with really good parental influences basically had those sorts of powers on their first go because they were taught.
I got bloody noses and migraines constantly while growing up because nobody ever told me to drink water. That tidbit alone would be life changing.
A hilariously depressing exercise is just reading old news paper headlines from whatever decade you want to pick and seeing what the world was like then.
I've yet to see a decade where the average person wasn't a hairs breadth away from dying in various unpleasant ways, some musical accompaniment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g
It's like we have access to everything one could want now, which is awesome, but that feels like it's bad for us, collectively, since we have no self control.
The 24 hour news cycle has been a thing since at least 1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN#Gulf_War which incidentally are some of my first memories.
In the 90s you might not have had a mobile phone, but every place you went had a TV with one of the news channels on, and you'd be bombarded with what was happening on CNN, or Fox, or if you were in a really highbrow place the BBC, every 15 minutes. I'd say I'm less exposed to news today because I have earbuds that isolate me much better than anything I could plug into a walkman in the 90s.
At one point I had two part time jobs and took night classes. At none of those places were a TV.
In fact, the only places I distinctly remember with TVs were airports and bars/restaurants, and those were hit/miss with having news playing.
This seems like a generic complaint that's not specific to this particular thread's article. This article is about the rise of middleman agency platforms to connect brands to internet celeberties with a following.
And then there's this:
>I for one don't want to be an influencer.
But you're the CEO of:
>Gastrograph AI is an artificial intelligence platform [...] to predict consumer preference of food and beverage products.
>We helps food and beverage companies [...] optimize existing brands.
With your business background, you're actually one of the folks that can add substantive commentary to this. You want to help brands reach consumers. So do internet celebrities.
I found the articles thesis more general, that many more individuals want to become paid influencers, and the lower acceptance rate of middleman agencies as proof that the supply of want-to-be influencers has increased.
>You want to help brands reach consumers.
I am the CEO of AFS, but my company works on flavor profile development of new and existing products - deep R&D of flavor, aroma, and texture optimization. This is far upstream of marketing and branding which we are uninvolved with.
What social trends will influence your decision? Will the future be better (correction) or even worse (exacerbation)?