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It's not just you — no one is posting on social media anymore (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Social media is on the decline. Instagram is all ads. No one's posting on BeReal. TikTok is for influencers. The new place for sharing: group chats.

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[–] 225 points 3 years ago (24 children)

The concept of "influencer" as a career needs to die a quick death.

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  • [–] [S] 93 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    it's fancy speak for "salesman"

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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago* (13 children)

    I mean I think it's a fine career, it's the name that's dumb.

    For the most part they're just entertainers. The "influencer" name suggests way more than should be.

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  • [–] 33 points 3 years ago* (10 children)

    Entertainers are supposed to be entertaining though.

    These people have all the "entertainment" value of a late-night infomercial at best. "Oooh, watch me get excited about unboxing this item. Whatever could have Disney sent me this week?"

    The worst problem is that these influencers do gain huge amounts of followers, but rarely fact-check or do hard sciences needed to ya know, give information to viewers? See Linus Tech Tips and the whole crap they're into right now.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago*

    I mean, they're mostly indie and could probably easily be compared to stand-up comedians.

    Which if we look at it's history is a very crash-and-burn career itself. I think a lot of them are entertaining. But it's certainly a saturated market where it can feel like a needle in a haystack at times.

    And really, the issue with LTT, is an issue. But keep in mind on the internet we largely mock news sites in general for being uninformative and many being glorified blogs. It's not as uncommon as we unfortunately may think.

    But basically a lot of what is souring you on influencers, either has already happened in other careers or is currently happening to others as well, just we don't think about it as much.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    Well “entertaining” is subjective. If these people weren’t entertaining, they wouldn’t have so many followers.

    There are absolutely a ton of people out there taking advantage of certain people and manipulating them as opposed to actually being entertaining, but that’s not an “influencer” problem, that’s just a people problem. That happens in every industry with human interaction.

    Plenty of influencers just post content they think their followers will like and use that following to make money as well. And a lot of the time, their followers actually enjoy the things they advertise.

    And the great thing is if you don’t like the concept, you can just not follow them.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    If you were objectively correct and that folks didn't find them entertaining, there wouldn't be the industry and they wouldn't have their followers. It's the same phenomenon that makes reality TV such a big money maker.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago* (4 children)

    Reality TV is a money maker because you barely need any writers.

    Reality TV was a reaction to the (repeated) writers strikes. Content, no matter the quality, sells eyeballs. Quality almost doesn't matter in practice. As such, shitty TV that is poorly written makes money because their costs are so low. Not necessarily because people find them entertaining.

    They're the McDonalds of Hollywood. Low effort, low cost content designed to fill up televisions but keep audiences with "something" between the major shows people watch.

    And no. Reality TV isn't "real" either, its just unscripted, low effort television. Its roughly WWE where characters (and their actors) are given much leeway into the shots / script because they don't want to pay real writers to make an actual script.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    It has a lot of eyeballs. That's the whole point. They were extremely popular shows. I don't understand how you're just swiping that part under the rug as if it didn't matter. If no one watched them, they'd stop. They watch them because many people found it entertaining to watch. I can't believe you're trying to create a conspiracy that a bunch of people watched a show because they... didn't enjoy it?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    Dude, this is well known Hollywood information.

    https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2023-04-10/writers-strike-reality-tv-unions

    Most of the producers who craft reality TV story lines are not affiliated with a union and will not be affected by a strike. The genre also tends to be cheaper and less time-consuming to produce than scripted TV, making it an ideal alternative during past work stoppages.

    Hardly a conspiracy theory. Reality TV is about cheapness, getting non-union work, fewer writers (or even no writers at all), and having far cheaper production.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    It's a double edged sword. I do like some of the niche content the industry has created. I like coffee and I get a lot of indepth coffee analysis from folks who likely wouldn't be able to spend the time doing so if they needed "real" jobs. I think it's the ones where there's no actual valuable content that is what gets people annoyed. I don't understand how someone can just play video games in front of a camera. Or where they're famous for their personality.

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