9 ms·

Fake Fans

159 points by performative 6mo ago

jwpapi 6mo ago
I’ve noticed a lot of fake Tik Tok comments recently and was wondering already..
- bossyTeacher 6mo ago
  Fake comments are like cockroaches. If you see one, you must assume there are 10x more that you are not noticing
cobbzilla 6mo ago
Modern payola. Fascinating but not entirely unpredictable. I’m excited by the focus on hyper-local, authenticity is the scarce resource. Great artists are usually not the best marketers, but nothing beats “I am here, this is real”. No amount of algorithmic magic can create that experience.
- girvo 6mo ago
  > Great artists are usually not the best marketers, but nothing beats “I am here, this is real”. Agreed 100%, which is why my local city's (Brisbane) post-rock scene of the 2000s-2010s was so important to me But it's also why despite being phenomenal musicians, they all worked normal jobs (even those related bands who were indie-rock enough to be played on Triple J even though they weren't) and they've all stopped playing because touring loses money. I will always have the music and the years of amazing experiences and the photos of the shows I took, but hyper-local means niche and niche means unsustainable, I think.
  - cobbzilla 6mo ago
    Yeah art is art, it’s never paid well generally. You do it because you love it, and your audience loves it. And that is awesome. And then commerce is commerce, and you make money and more money means you did something good. And then you put the two together and it’s the same shit we’ve seen for thousands of years. tbh no surprises! This is all as expected. There’s still phenomenal live music in every city I’ve ever visited, to the present day. Just go out and find it, it’s not hard! Support live local music
    - gedy 6mo ago
      I do think when rent was cheaper (globally) you could live even when not paid well.
- jfengel 6mo ago
  I have found that the great artists you've heard of tend to also be great marketers, or at the very least found great marketers. I know quite a few extremely talented artists who could never crack the marketing, and so nobody else has ever heard of them. Even local fame requires a fair bit of hustle. Talent alone doesn't get you there.
  - cobbzilla 6mo ago
    Could this be confirmation bias? Isn’t this the point of the unique & real discovery process that actual connoisseurs of an art form participate in? We find you (great artist), because you are brilliant at your art but terrible at marketing. Then you might become popular because 1) we (the finders, the influencers) talk about you (I mean personally here, friend to friend, in person, not social media) and 2) if your art has broad appeal, it just needed the marketing. word of mouth marketing is the most authentic kind so of course it’s being faked! There are many artists that I love that “no one has ever heard of” and that’s fine! At some point, some of them will make something with broad appeal and it’ll catch on. There’s money at stake so of course people are trying to juice the process, but that’s been going on for a very long time, hence my original reference to payola (pay to play on radio) which started in the 1930s! None of this payola bullshit takes anything away from the true talent producing amazing art today! It just means, as it always has, that if you want the good stuff you have to do your own research. Most are too lazy and that’s fine! They have other interests. But the art form itself does not suffer because there exist grifters who distort mass perception. Connoisseurs are less interested in mass perception.
    - cobbzilla 6mo ago
      As a counterpoint to my own argument above — the Ramones made more money selling T-shirts; every artist must market somehow; so yeah it’s definitely more complicated, I am presenting an oversimplified view. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47473673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47473673
  - mbb70 6mo ago
    Reminds me of "a terrible project with a great slide deck might end up decent. A great project with a terrible slide deck won't even exist." In the real world there is no If You Build It They Will Come, you've got to get the word out
- doctorpangloss 6mo ago
  Not at all. Saying something like that is the loudest signal for how out of touch you are with how audiences are made. From the article: > "...it’s like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.” What is this trying to say? For every 1 person who thinks about truth in some independent way, I don't care if it's spiritual or because they do scientific tests for what the best music is or all of this other stuff; there are 19 people who are, "LIKES = TRUTH". Are you getting it? That has nothing to do with payola or authenticity or scarcity or whatever. You have no idea anyway, you've never had to make a creative product. Likes = truth. Authenticity is the seeming unlikelihood that social media content authors are bought and sold. It's the OPPOSITE of what you think. It is the OPPOSITE of payola. And look, they're right. The vast majority of opinions on TikTok are not paid for. This is the OPPOSITE of radio.
  - cobbzilla 6mo ago
    > Likes = truth sounds like pop culture = art which is obviously not true
    - t-3 6mo ago
      But it's what at least some people making/selling music believe, or else they wouldn't be buying likes.
  - 998244353 6mo ago
    I cannot understand what you're trying to say at all.
  - balamatom 6mo ago
    Yeah yeah, instead of manufacturing the consent they're manufacturing the whole consenters now. Afuckingmazing. "Clap along, if you feel that happiness is the truth..." Then one of those days someone comes along and claps back.
    - readersdings 6mo ago
fwipsy 6mo ago
Recently rereading William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" and I'm struck by his belief that certain art or memes are objectively good and destined for virality. I think both Gibson and this author are wrong. No content is intrinsically destined for success. There are countless amazing artists, available to anyone. Any sort of quality, insight, talent, novelty are table stakes. If someone is big, they're either extremely lucky, they got in on the ground floor, or there's marketing money behind them.
- balamatom 6mo ago
  >objectively good >destined for virality Antonyms, in my book. >Any sort of quality, insight, talent, novelty are table stakes So that's why I ain't seeing much of those lately. You sayin' someone left 'em on the table? >If someone is big, they're either extremely lucky, they got in on the ground floor, or there's marketing money behind them. Yes. Meaning, if you're big, I simply do not wish to hear about you or what you have to express; you're simply the thing that ascribes to the money its value. Relatedly, an ancient saying: "I do not happen to be a connoiseur of the different flavours of excrement".
  - andrewflnr 6mo ago
    Not antonyms. Some good art goes viral on its own merits. But certainly not synonyms either.
  - ghtbircshotbe 6mo ago
    Lately when I watch a video on YouTube, every single one of the recommended videos is AI slop. Not sure what the next 5 years holds. It does make me question the argument that bad AI generated content is equivalent to bad human generated content. And they all have hundreds of thousands of views, another mystery.
    - AJ007 6mo ago
      A dirty secret is the algorithms can't differentiate real users from fake. The universe of content is so large now, if you don't start with a fake audience you go nowhere. Slop rises to the top, because slopfarms can spend all their money on the farming rather than the content. It's even worse if you look at short form video because it's trivial to clone anything that went viral and alter the message, no real human or attractive 20 year old American required. If content requires a real human network for transmission, the cost of transmitting slop is your own reputation within your network. A bunch of bots circle jerking each other can't sell concert tickets or much of anything. The idea that some artist is exceptionally talented and good and they deserve to be famous or sell out concerts is a myth. There are so many exceptionally skilled singers, songwriters, and musicians that are all unknowns. Many who are more talented than (insert famous living or dead pop star here.) I think this is part of the reason why the AI ruins creativity is overblown. The music-art-talent pyramid always meant a tiny percent at the top walked away with all of the money. Look at the numbers from the last screen actor's guild strike, the majority of actors earn at or below minimum wage. It's a new world, and the old one people believe deserves to continue perpetually existed in but a blink of human civilization.
SL61 6mo ago
It doesn't surprise me at all that this is going on. There are lots of social media fan pages that are run by real people who post real content 99% of the time but are willing to post promo material for a fee. Usually that fee is pretty high, easily $100-500 depending on the account's follower count, with different price points for how long it stays up (pay more for a permanent post, pay less and it gets deleted after X number of hours). It's really effective because those accounts already have a well-established presence and function as tastemakers.
adamtaylor_13 6mo ago
Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it's some sort of right. It would be nice if that were true. AI has exacerbated this issue. Suddenly we're faced with the uncomfortable truth that much of human artwork is "mid" as the kids would say and people aren't willing to pay for songs, writing, and/or graphics the way they otherwise might. Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable.
- palmotea 6mo ago
  > Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it's some sort of right. Comments like yours seem to be written with the unspoken assumption that everyone's life should be hard unless they can please the market, which technology makes increasingly difficult. It's deeply anti-human. > AI has exacerbated this issue. Suddenly we're faced with the uncomfortable truth that much of human artwork is "mid" as the kids would say and people aren't willing to pay for songs, writing, and/or graphics the way they otherwise might. Is that news to anyone? But mid people exist, they worthy people, and they need to eat. AI is leading us to a dystopia where, unless you're in the top 0.1% of talent, the market has no use for you. And guess what happens to you then? > Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable. Because that was the last promise the tech bros made: our tech will replace you, then you get to be an artist, be creative! Now it will take your creative job, and free you up for draining monitoring tasks and manual labor.
  - y-curious 6mo ago
    People are only willing to pay for quality, mostly. I can’t just say that I’m a neurosurgeon because I want to be one. There has always been reward for merit and suffering for lack of merit. Nothing “anti human” about social Darwinism
svantana 6mo ago
I'd like to know more about "Chaotic Good Projects" [1]. Isn't it fascinating that they so openly do "UGC" (user-generated content) and "Fanpages" even though they are neither users nor fans, but paid consultants. And even openly displaying the musical acts they performed these dark-pattern services for. [1] https://chaoticgoodprojects.org/ https://chaoticgoodprojects.org/
TrackerFF 6mo ago
Not sure how this is ethically different from industry plants or payola. Things which have been in the industry since the dawn of time. Astroturfing with fake fans is just the natural next step due to how easy it is. Back in the day some labels would drum up fake engagement by handing out tickets to influential people, paying certain people to go, and things like that.
spongebobstoes 6mo ago
I dislike music elitism, and this piece has a lot of it. music is both art and entertainment it's no secret that being an artist is a tough path with little chance of success
probably_wrong 6mo ago
> One day after this piece went up, Chaotic Good made significant changes to their website — including pulling the “Narrative Campaign” section completely. I checked the Internet Archive but I cannot access any of the archived versions. Apparently the website uses JS to display its content and the IA can't deal with it. Internet searches show that the page existed, though, so I'll take the content deletion as proof.
- armchairhacker 6mo ago
  https://archive.md/AjZPm https://archive.md/AjZPm
- bossyTeacher 6mo ago
  > Apparently the website uses JS to display its content and the IA can't deal with it This is going to become more and more popular sadly.

Fake Fans

159 points by performative 6mo ago

jwpapi 6mo ago

I’ve noticed a lot of fake Tik Tok comments recently and was wondering already..

bossyTeacher 6mo ago
Fake comments are like cockroaches. If you see one, you must assume there are 10x more that you are not noticing

cobbzilla 6mo ago

Modern payola. Fascinating but not entirely unpredictable. I’m excited by the focus on hyper-local, authenticity is the scarce resource. Great artists are usually not the best marketers, but nothing beats “I am here, this is real”. No amount of algorithmic magic can create that experience.

girvo 6mo ago
> Great artists are usually not the best marketers, but nothing beats “I am here, this is real”. Agreed 100%, which is why my local city's (Brisbane) post-rock scene of the 2000s-2010s was so important to me But it's also why despite being phenomenal musicians, they all worked normal jobs (even those related bands who were indie-rock enough to be played on Triple J even though they weren't) and they've all stopped playing because touring loses money. I will always have the music and the years of amazing experiences and the photos of the shows I took, but hyper-local means niche and niche means unsustainable, I think.
- cobbzilla 6mo ago
  Yeah art is art, it’s never paid well generally. You do it because you love it, and your audience loves it. And that is awesome. And then commerce is commerce, and you make money and more money means you did something good. And then you put the two together and it’s the same shit we’ve seen for thousands of years. tbh no surprises! This is all as expected. There’s still phenomenal live music in every city I’ve ever visited, to the present day. Just go out and find it, it’s not hard! Support live local music
  - gedy 6mo ago
    I do think when rent was cheaper (globally) you could live even when not paid well.
jfengel 6mo ago
I have found that the great artists you've heard of tend to also be great marketers, or at the very least found great marketers. I know quite a few extremely talented artists who could never crack the marketing, and so nobody else has ever heard of them. Even local fame requires a fair bit of hustle. Talent alone doesn't get you there.
- cobbzilla 6mo ago
  Could this be confirmation bias? Isn’t this the point of the unique & real discovery process that actual connoisseurs of an art form participate in? We find you (great artist), because you are brilliant at your art but terrible at marketing. Then you might become popular because 1) we (the finders, the influencers) talk about you (I mean personally here, friend to friend, in person, not social media) and 2) if your art has broad appeal, it just needed the marketing. word of mouth marketing is the most authentic kind so of course it’s being faked! There are many artists that I love that “no one has ever heard of” and that’s fine! At some point, some of them will make something with broad appeal and it’ll catch on. There’s money at stake so of course people are trying to juice the process, but that’s been going on for a very long time, hence my original reference to payola (pay to play on radio) which started in the 1930s! None of this payola bullshit takes anything away from the true talent producing amazing art today! It just means, as it always has, that if you want the good stuff you have to do your own research. Most are too lazy and that’s fine! They have other interests. But the art form itself does not suffer because there exist grifters who distort mass perception. Connoisseurs are less interested in mass perception.
  - cobbzilla 6mo ago
    As a counterpoint to my own argument above — the Ramones made more money selling T-shirts; every artist must market somehow; so yeah it’s definitely more complicated, I am presenting an oversimplified view. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47473673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47473673
- mbb70 6mo ago
  Reminds me of "a terrible project with a great slide deck might end up decent. A great project with a terrible slide deck won't even exist." In the real world there is no If You Build It They Will Come, you've got to get the word out
doctorpangloss 6mo ago
Not at all. Saying something like that is the loudest signal for how out of touch you are with how audiences are made. From the article: > "...it’s like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.” What is this trying to say? For every 1 person who thinks about truth in some independent way, I don't care if it's spiritual or because they do scientific tests for what the best music is or all of this other stuff; there are 19 people who are, "LIKES = TRUTH". Are you getting it? That has nothing to do with payola or authenticity or scarcity or whatever. You have no idea anyway, you've never had to make a creative product. Likes = truth. Authenticity is the seeming unlikelihood that social media content authors are bought and sold. It's the OPPOSITE of what you think. It is the OPPOSITE of payola. And look, they're right. The vast majority of opinions on TikTok are not paid for. This is the OPPOSITE of radio.
- cobbzilla 6mo ago
  > Likes = truth sounds like pop culture = art which is obviously not true
  - t-3 6mo ago
    But it's what at least some people making/selling music believe, or else they wouldn't be buying likes.
- 998244353 6mo ago
  I cannot understand what you're trying to say at all.
- balamatom 6mo ago
  Yeah yeah, instead of manufacturing the consent they're manufacturing the whole consenters now. Afuckingmazing. "Clap along, if you feel that happiness is the truth..." Then one of those days someone comes along and claps back.
  - readersdings 6mo ago

fwipsy 6mo ago

Recently rereading William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" and I'm struck by his belief that certain art or memes are objectively good and destined for virality. I think both Gibson and this author are wrong. No content is intrinsically destined for success. There are countless amazing artists, available to anyone. Any sort of quality, insight, talent, novelty are table stakes. If someone is big, they're either extremely lucky, they got in on the ground floor, or there's marketing money behind them.

balamatom 6mo ago
>objectively good >destined for virality Antonyms, in my book. >Any sort of quality, insight, talent, novelty are table stakes So that's why I ain't seeing much of those lately. You sayin' someone left 'em on the table? >If someone is big, they're either extremely lucky, they got in on the ground floor, or there's marketing money behind them. Yes. Meaning, if you're big, I simply do not wish to hear about you or what you have to express; you're simply the thing that ascribes to the money its value. Relatedly, an ancient saying: "I do not happen to be a connoiseur of the different flavours of excrement".
- andrewflnr 6mo ago
  Not antonyms. Some good art goes viral on its own merits. But certainly not synonyms either.
- ghtbircshotbe 6mo ago
  Lately when I watch a video on YouTube, every single one of the recommended videos is AI slop. Not sure what the next 5 years holds. It does make me question the argument that bad AI generated content is equivalent to bad human generated content. And they all have hundreds of thousands of views, another mystery.
  - AJ007 6mo ago
    A dirty secret is the algorithms can't differentiate real users from fake. The universe of content is so large now, if you don't start with a fake audience you go nowhere. Slop rises to the top, because slopfarms can spend all their money on the farming rather than the content. It's even worse if you look at short form video because it's trivial to clone anything that went viral and alter the message, no real human or attractive 20 year old American required. If content requires a real human network for transmission, the cost of transmitting slop is your own reputation within your network. A bunch of bots circle jerking each other can't sell concert tickets or much of anything. The idea that some artist is exceptionally talented and good and they deserve to be famous or sell out concerts is a myth. There are so many exceptionally skilled singers, songwriters, and musicians that are all unknowns. Many who are more talented than (insert famous living or dead pop star here.) I think this is part of the reason why the AI ruins creativity is overblown. The music-art-talent pyramid always meant a tiny percent at the top walked away with all of the money. Look at the numbers from the last screen actor's guild strike, the majority of actors earn at or below minimum wage. It's a new world, and the old one people believe deserves to continue perpetually existed in but a blink of human civilization.

SL61 6mo ago

It doesn't surprise me at all that this is going on. There are lots of social media fan pages that are run by real people who post real content 99% of the time but are willing to post promo material for a fee. Usually that fee is pretty high, easily $100-500 depending on the account's follower count, with different price points for how long it stays up (pay more for a permanent post, pay less and it gets deleted after X number of hours). It's really effective because those accounts already have a well-established presence and function as tastemakers.

adamtaylor_13 6mo ago

Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it's some sort of right. It would be nice if that were true. AI has exacerbated this issue. Suddenly we're faced with the uncomfortable truth that much of human artwork is "mid" as the kids would say and people aren't willing to pay for songs, writing, and/or graphics the way they otherwise might. Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable.

palmotea 6mo ago
> Pieces like this all seem to be written with an unspoken assumption that anyone who wants to make a living wage from being an artist should be able to, as if it's some sort of right. Comments like yours seem to be written with the unspoken assumption that everyone's life should be hard unless they can please the market, which technology makes increasingly difficult. It's deeply anti-human. > AI has exacerbated this issue. Suddenly we're faced with the uncomfortable truth that much of human artwork is "mid" as the kids would say and people aren't willing to pay for songs, writing, and/or graphics the way they otherwise might. Is that news to anyone? But mid people exist, they worthy people, and they need to eat. AI is leading us to a dystopia where, unless you're in the top 0.1% of talent, the market has no use for you. And guess what happens to you then? > Anyway, I'm very curious if anyone has a good argument for why anyone who wishes to be an artist is owed a living wage for merely their desire to be recognized as economically valuable. Because that was the last promise the tech bros made: our tech will replace you, then you get to be an artist, be creative! Now it will take your creative job, and free you up for draining monitoring tasks and manual labor.
- y-curious 6mo ago
  People are only willing to pay for quality, mostly. I can’t just say that I’m a neurosurgeon because I want to be one. There has always been reward for merit and suffering for lack of merit. Nothing “anti human” about social Darwinism

svantana 6mo ago

I'd like to know more about "Chaotic Good Projects" [1]. Isn't it fascinating that they so openly do "UGC" (user-generated content) and "Fanpages" even though they are neither users nor fans, but paid consultants. And even openly displaying the musical acts they performed these dark-pattern services for. [1] https://chaoticgoodprojects.org/ https://chaoticgoodprojects.org/

TrackerFF 6mo ago

Not sure how this is ethically different from industry plants or payola. Things which have been in the industry since the dawn of time. Astroturfing with fake fans is just the natural next step due to how easy it is. Back in the day some labels would drum up fake engagement by handing out tickets to influential people, paying certain people to go, and things like that.

spongebobstoes 6mo ago

I dislike music elitism, and this piece has a lot of it. music is both art and entertainment it's no secret that being an artist is a tough path with little chance of success

probably_wrong 6mo ago

> One day after this piece went up, Chaotic Good made significant changes to their website — including pulling the “Narrative Campaign” section completely. I checked the Internet Archive but I cannot access any of the archived versions. Apparently the website uses JS to display its content and the IA can't deal with it. Internet searches show that the page existed, though, so I'll take the content deletion as proof.

armchairhacker 6mo ago
https://archive.md/AjZPm https://archive.md/AjZPm
bossyTeacher 6mo ago
> Apparently the website uses JS to display its content and the IA can't deal with it This is going to become more and more popular sadly.