Forget the influencers. Here come the ‘deinfluencers’ | Hacker News Reader

Forget the influencers. Here come the ‘deinfluencers’

cnn.com

10 pointsrntn15 comments

Influencer: someone who affects or changes the way that other people behave.

A "deinfluencer" would be someone that does _not_ affect or changes the way other people behave (like me).

Which is clearly not what this article implies with the term. The people described in the article are also influencers. They just provide negative reviews instead of (paid) positive ones.

Whatever. This is nonsense. Influencer or defluencer, you're just a cog in the big click farm machine. Bad press is good press and all that.

A true defluencer would be someone who's not on those platforms. Slow news day at CNN?

"De-influencing" is what the subculture calls itself. It's stated goal is to compensate for the influencing by influencing you in the opposite direction, by showing you the product without the glamor.

The creators are very aware that they're also influencers.

Yeah, this is just adding more fuel and kicking the advertising engine into a higher gear. The influencers and "deinfluencers" may pretend to be in opposition, but what they really do is drive more traffic to each other.

See also: influencer dramas, commentary channels. Lots of people get a lot of views (and ad exposure) for manufacturing and amplifying stupid, childish dramas. It's like a distributed, bottom-up reality show - lots of people write pieces of the script in a collaborative, best-effort basis, and advertisers just laugh at the money they make on viewers sold on "authenticity".

> What is deinfluencing? Deinfluencing is an emerging social media trend that discourages consumers from buying certain products that the deinfluencer has found to be indulgent, ineffective or not worth the money.

Here I was thinking nothing could be worse than influencer culture ...

What’s wrong? How is this worse than influencer culture? At its worst it’s as bad. But it actually can be better. There’s nothing wrong with everyone buying less crap they don’t need.

I would assume the deinfluencer would not strictly keep to bad products. Given influencers don't only peddle good products.

True. I can totally see this going the way of „denunciation as a service „

would the lauded coffeezilla be an example of this?

If so I'm down with it.

Brand short-sellers, but way worse?

Soooo .. who's paying them to advertise the cheaper products? Is this just ads for Shein again?

Maybe if they gain enough followers, companies will pay them NOT to deinfluence them?

Effectively another feel good tax that will be added atop to the consumer price

Strange word for value oriented shopping!

I know one of the influencers in this article. Kris Ruby is a huge influencer in politics and media.

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