@carcinopithecus To fill up an instance's federated timeline, which, of course, displays all the accounts followed by anyone on the instance.
There's another flavour too. I don't know that this is common in the Fediverse, but followbots exist on more mainstream social media sites, and customers will pay to have a certain number follow them for a certain duration. This inflates the customer's follow count, which makes it easier to score "influencer" deals.
@carcinopithecus@x0r.be
Well I don't think anyone will pay you to promote their brand on the Fediverse. But I know people who have been offered money to post things the company wants, contingent on maintaining at least six hundred followers, on a commercial site.
@khird Yeah, influencers used as billboards. It smacks of insincerity and dishonesty tbh, and really turns me off of following accounts. Like, I want to follow you because you're *you*, not because you're shilling for someone else.
The more I think about it, the more I feel some form of #UBI would serve as an effective alternative to marketing-driven economy, and one that better supports the human spirit. It's just a shame that we don't have many examples of it in the world today.
@dragfyre I don't see UBI displacing the marketing payments. Businesses are still going to compete for their customers' dollars, whether they earn those dollars as wages/salary or are allocated them as UBI, so the demand for influence-marketers will remain.
Influence-marketing is such a low-effort way to supplement income that UBI doesn't seem likely to discourage supply either. By the time you've put any sort of a dent in it, lots of other, higher-effort cottage industries will be in much worse shape.
@khird I honestly don't know enough about the economic side of it, just enough to be interested. Although to be clear, what I was wondering about was a way for content creators to not have to depend on advertising dollars in order to create. You're right that influence-marketing will probably never go away, just like advertising will never go away. It'd just be nice to have other, equally reliable funding options, so that it wouldn't *need* to be so ubiquitous.
@khird ...although with that said, giving yourself 10M bot followers can definitely be useful for social engineering purposes, not to mention for #SEO. The #internet is as interconnected as the rest of the human world, and just the fact of creating one somewhat-more-ethical platform doesn't transform the whole network. Individuals and society have to change in tandem; the same applies to the net.
@khird Yeah, that's definitely present on #socialmedia. I suppose the "influencer" phenomenon does exist on the #Fediverse to some extent, although I don't think it's magnified in the same way as on, say, Twitter, because account discovery is a lot more restricted due to #ethics concerns. Doesn't matter if you have 10M bots following you on #Mastodon, there's no algorithm that'll promote you because of it.