Huh

[contrarianarchon]

I just got two follows in rapid succession on bandcamp. I was not, I must say, aware that this was a thing that could happen. I wonder why?

(TBH still mildly in shock that there are people who are willing to read my blog here, let alone people who are willing to follow me for my ... good taste in music? What?)

On an unrelated note, I figured out to make good teriyaki! The secret is that the sauce is literally 1 cup of soy sauce and one cup of brown sugar and garlic!

Comments

[brin_bellway]

>>(Boutique and freelance follower-for-hire? That sure sounds like a thing. How did that work?)<<

Many people/companies with strong social-media presences (I mostly worked with romance novelists, fashion bloggers, and parenting bloggers) hold very nudge-winky ""giveaways"" in which one gains entries by interacting with their stuff. They *ideally* want people to be lured in by contests and then start genuinely reading their stuff, but given how many of them used things like "your message will go out to over X thousand Twitter followers!" as a selling point when trying to attract advertisers, I expect a lot of them would consider [anything that makes their apparent engagement numbers go up] to be helpful to their goals.

(Some of them have gotten caught playing the metrics: I was there when the book-stuffing scandal came out. I'd worked for book-stuffers (though not in that particular aspect; no Kindle Unlimited subscription), but hadn't previously realised that book-stuffing was a metric-playing tactic. I'd been *wondering* why so many books came with several of the author's previous works...)

Getting paid in raffle tickets is annoying, but if you do, say, 10 contests/day for a year, and each one has an expected value of a few cents (the market for freelance followers seemed to be mostly in equilibrium, with the number of competitors in a giveaway scaling linearly with the size of the prize), it can average out in the long term.

I did follows, likes, sometimes comments. Most of them give extra entries if you signal-boost them, but an account composed entirely of paid signal boosts is too obviously fake, and I didn't want to put in the amount of effort involved in constructing a persona who actively posted. I merely put a non-default icon on the accounts, plus profile notes that I was a lurker just there for the content aggregation.

---

Looking back at my previous posts that touch on it, I can see I've been getting increasingly less vague about exactly what it was I was doing. Probably because I've stopped doing it: I left my dedicated newsletter email subscribed to the more useful sources just in case, but I don't seriously expect to return. I've burned myself out on menial Internet labour, especially the kinds that pay erratically. And I have more access to minimum wage now (when I started doing paid social-media engagement I was unemployed, and for a while I was working 3 - 6 hours/week; currently it's more like 10 - 20), making ~$1/hour relatively less appealing.

[contrarianarchon]

Huh. Seems fair. I don't have much to comment - you seem to have thought it all out pretty sensibly.

(I'm glad you were able/willing to talk about in detail, though)