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Comment by freecodyx | Hacker News Reader

Influencers culture has killed social media platforms, most ppl want to be influencers today to make easy money. Back in the days social media platforms were used to connect with friends and maybe strangers just for the sake of socializing. Not anymore

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Influencers are just the byproduct of social media platforms commoditizing interaction as means of driving growth and engagement, since just keeping up to date with your friends doesn't drive much engagement. Once you add metrics for engagement like likes, retweets or whatever, it is only natural that interactions become gamified once you put these incentive structures into how the system functions.

mobile phones set us on a trajectory from the internet back to TV. No doubt the next big social network will be an auto-advancing video feed, i.e. a TV channel that won't be called a tv channel. It's what people want, nothing was killed, just people played with the toys for a while, got bored and moved elsewhere

Even before “influencers” young people often wanted to be media or athletic stats of some sort, so that isn’t new.

The drive to increase “engagement” and ad reviews is killing it (which is related to influencers). YouTube is basically unwatchable without an way to block ads. Young people began to abandon Facebook when they opened it up to everyone and let boomers spam their family and friends with every political chain letter and video they come across.

I wanted to be on Americas Funniest Home Videos, the prelude to YouTube and TikTok. Oof.

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