Profiles are rarely accurate. I viewed the same profile from two different instances (yes the same profile, not the same username from two different instances) and they didn’t even have the age of thr account the same. One was 2 years, one was 2 months. So I wouldn’t trust that. I’d only trust it if you’re logged into that very instance.
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.
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.
Might as well say Instagram isn’t social media either, nor is Facebook or Twitter. Social media is just a platform where one of the biggest parts of it is the commenting system. Its a social media platform for content aggregation. The commenting makes it social.
Web 2.0 was the advent of user generated content. Web 1.0 was not. It was site-generated content for the most part. Some forums possibly. But it was extremely static and was very poor way to find user generated content.
That’s basically how most of Instagram works and is what the article is about. No one knows folks on those platforms either. They aren’t “social” anymore. No one shares anything personal, it’s all “content” created for millions of followers by influencers and the like. This is probably more like social media than current platforms are. It’s closer to what social media was when it started.
Seems extremely unlikely. There’s very little reach on here compared to elsewhere. It’s not easily quantifiable nor can it be easily verified. It’s extremely easy to hack metrics. There’s no business sense to pay someone for posts on the fediverse yet. Don’t be paranoid and don’t become conspiratorial.
Edit: added “yet” because those things could possibly change.
Isn’t that what the summary above pretty much says with even less words?
It was coined by Doctorow and his article about it is very popular on the fediverse.
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?