Fake Fans
performative
93 points
18 comments
April 03, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (5 comments)
jwpapi
I’ve noticed a lot of fake Tik Tok comments recently and was wondering already..
cobbzilla
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.
fwipsy
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.
SL61
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
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.