We’re moving towards an Internet that’s just one never ending loop of regurgitated spam. Call me naive, but I wish people wielding these skills felt more responsibility to be good citizens of the Internet, rather than spamming cyclical stolen content and “growth hacking” their way to followers by manipulating social networks. The Internet is in no way, shape or form, pure. But I do wish we would stop treating fellow users (humans) as play things just to get a free dinner.
Is it just because I grew up on the Internet starting 20+ years ago that I’m hyper sensitive to spam?
See this post on Reddit where someone is driving in people’s blindspots to give them an opportunity to use their modified car horn that sounds like a train horn. Inevitably, another account asks them where they got their car’s horn, and then they can plug their (or their client’s) website.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/comments/tjnsgt/my_tra...
There are always gonna be social media marketers when the audience on the medium grows.
But what about the average user. They post a picture of their night out at a club in NYC. Some automated bot comes along and follows them because the venue is tagged marking that they live nearby.
They’re sitting at work and get a notification that they’ve been followed. ::dopamine hit:: They pick up their phone, distracting them and check the account. Oh cool! This account has 20k followers and only follows 400 people, I must be special. ::dopamine hit::
This account has co-opted their attention via a push notification.
They follow the account back and get their feed filled with automated posts even though they’re under the impression it’s a curated account. They’re being subtly manipulated into looking at empty content, maybe even going to some of the restaurants, under the guise of genuine recommendations when it’s purely spam and noise.
Is this a travesty? Probably not. Am I being dramatic? Almost certainly. But it kind of sucks and can get out of control quickly. I know people who get thousands of push notifications each day, and who’s feeds are filled with doom scrolling-friendly garbage. It’s not healthy.
In the same way that dumpster diving also gets you free food - but you are essentially a parasite, living on the waste of others. At least with the dumpster diving, the relationship is clear.
He generates literally nothing of value here - everything is stolen from others.
I truly hope we end up with the same social aversions to things like this that we do for other taboo social activities.
This is the opposite, in that we are as a species probably less well off, but its not really any more destructive than other forms of astroturfing (marketers and robots pretending to be real people).
I stopped reading, right there.
I agree that he's no different than other "influencers". I would just contend that they also create nothing of value.
It'd be funny if the views and likes are also from bots. As well as there being a bot that algorithmically judge promotion solicitations from "influencers" and automatically dispenses the free meal from their advertising budget (is it really just a free meal?). Makes me want to write a short story (I wish I had movie making talents for a short movie) where social media bots keep reposting content and sending heart emojis to each other after the future where Putin's nukes killed us all (too soon?).
That would have been so much more interesting of a blog post; I'd love to see a write up that does some investigative work to determine just how much of engagement on instagram is driven by scripts.
> Makes me want to write a short story (I wish I had movie making talents for a short movie) where social media bots keep reposting content and sending heart emojis to each other after the future where Putin's nukes killed us all
I may just post this as written to reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/ :)
The scheme also seems doomed in that I'm hoping the restaurants aren't stupid enough to fall for it twice from the same account. At some point, he's going to run out of places close to him he can still get free food from and be forced to drive into Jersey, costing him more in wasted time, gas, and tolls than he would have spent just buying food.
Other than further polluting the new web with fake bullshit content, there doesn't seem to be anything immoral about it. It just "feels" a bit scummy. But hey, a man's gotta eat.
This is totally scummy.
In the context of this discussion, though, I think the "website" analogy fits just fine.
Yes, ideally by providing value to others in their community.
