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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Kardashian? No. Will not impact my buying habits whatsoever. But if LTT says to stay away from a product, I would be very very hesitant to consider it. If Attenborough does a psa, I will 100% take his opinion into consideration. Not everything is about "influencers".

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I think this is the immense difficult with plausibly fake information. The target doesn't just need to be influencer did X. To follow the LTT example, maybe LTT says stay away from my product, so I do deep fakes to erode trust and viewership in LTT. And this moves the needle towards other channels that maybe aren't quite so critical, or willing to sell their souls with them VPN ad money.

And most people say they wouldn't fall for it, but for some things, you might not need to move the needle very far.

Doesnt that just mean you need to validate the source of the video? If LTT says to stay way from a product on the LTT main youtube channel - that would seem valid?

If the video was a re-post or hosted elsewhere - then you would start to reconsider it?

Going further, digital watermarking is the obvious solution to this problem. Signed hash of each frame attached to the video, signed by the authors private key. You can verify integrity and authenticity if you trust the key.

Key sharing is annoying but at least you have continuity in the same sense as normal “reputation” and Keybase showed us it’s possible to like PGP keys to social media accounts with decent usability.

How many videos can you validate in a day? When someone watches 37 TikTok remixes in a row, how are they going to stop and check which ones are legit and which ones are fake?

Whoever it is, I typically want to hear their reasoning anyway. They can get my attention this way, but not my compliance against my own interests.

No one has the ability to validate everything they are told. If someone highly trusted and proven in the field makes a claim about something, you won’t just drop everything and spend the next 6 months validating it. You will implicitly place trust in their judgement.

The consequences of moving to a zero trust society will be major.

Is this an argument against LTT being an influencer?

I read it as an argument for LTT being an influence.

Sorry, broke my own standards. LTT = Linus Tech Tips. YouTuber.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXuqSBlHAE6Xw-yeJA0Tunw

WHO IS LTT

I think it is Linus Tech Tips.

Unclear if the OP would prefer makeup recommendations from Linus over Kim Kardasian or if they just don't buy makeup.

Linus tech tips is a YouTube channel by some guy in Canada who reviews computers and other tech. It’s turned into a kind of mini channel with other reviewers.

Not to be confused with “Linus” of Linux fame who doesn’t contribute to the channel.

Having influence is different than being an influencer. Influencers don't actually do anything beyond opinions. They review products in their living rooms, not at proper facilities employing dozens of people.

Influencer is a category of people that ad agencies are interested in. It's anyone with a large enough audience and influence over it. They are of interest to ad agencies because an endorsement will turn into more buyers.

Anything other than that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if the influencer is a YouTuber who does their original research and tech breakdowns to give an informed opinion of a product, or if it's an Instagram model that is willing to hold a purse for a photo. Both, when paid to endorse a product, will influence people into buying that product. LTT's sponsor breaks in the middle of videos (that usually have nothing to do with the subject matter of the video itself) influence people into buying those products. So, LTT is an influencer.

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