Most young people aren't that interesting. Older people tend to be more interesting, but no one wants to look at them.

It's like when movies show Charlie's Angels or James Bond fluently speaking multiple languages and efficiently wielding various weapons and skiing like Olympic skiers. You know that's not real. Any one of those things takes all your time to master. But it makes for a cool movie to bundle them all together.

And maybe people fell for it in part because we watch nonsense like James Bond. So it hit that note and didn't immediately set off alarm bells.

You can definitely do the James Bond semester at college if you're so inclined, which iirc is: wine tasting, handgun safety, cross country skiing, swedish massage, and ballroom dancing.

Introduction to Wines: https://sha.cornell.edu/admissions-programs/undergraduate/ac...

Introduction to Handgun Safety: https://courses.cornell.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=...

Cross Country Skiing: https://scl.cornell.edu/coe/pe-courses/spring-pe-courses/sno...

Swedish Massage: https://courses.cornell.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=...

Ballroom Dance: https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/SP20/class/PE/1153

Of course the advantage of going to Waterloo is that you can probably pass the Google coding interviews.

I'm not sure if they're offered anymore, but they used to have Basic Rifle Marksmanship and Epee de Guerre. My friend once told me he thought my major was "weapons".

In most of Svalbad you need to carry a rifle to defend yourself against polar bears.

I’d say that there’s not many of them if they go to school there.

That's your problem, but at you had:

Underwater Linux .iso Distributing

The Computational Fluid Dynamics of(strictly hypothetical) Human Sexual Intercourse in a Canoe

Outdoor Code Golf(Winter Session)

"E-Sports"

That’s not the Waterloo that I know

SimBudweiser?

It was one of the hardest courses I took at university - so much memorization of various wine regions around the world, grape varietals, etc.

By learning it I mean being proficient with it that you're smooth and comfortable with it, and can make your partner look good.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/2005-seabrook.pd...

Distributed and Massed Practice: From Laboratory to Classroom RACHEL SEABROOK

That's pretty much all you get in most undergrad courses anyway. It's usually an intro to, or first taste of, a sophisticated subject that would take a long time to master. It's only after many such intros (i.e. many hundreds of hours of study) that the student will begin to develop a more sophisticated understading of their chosen field.

In that light, is a 1-credit skiing course any different from a 1-credit astronomy course?

For example, when walking, one sets the foot down heel first. With ballroom dancing, it's ball first.

Pretty sure James Bond's handgun use is more on the unsafe side of things. I mean, he does have a license to kill and uses it frequently.

I can't read Japanese and I used Google translate for the post text (so maybe there's more depth that's lost in translation), but the pictures look to be pretty "generic influencer". None of those pictures look any different than what you would expect from a random 20 something influencer. Additionally, the text on the tweet is pretty much "I like motorcycles" along with "her" age and height. Everything here seems to be pretty much the same "here's a pretty girl in front of something" post that instagram is full of.

Again, I'm only going off the pictures and Google translate, so if someone who understands the culture better wants to correct me, feel free, but until that happens, I'm going to believe there's nothing more to this than a bunch of people wanting to look at a pretty girl.

Edit: Ran the tweet in the article through DeepL at the suggestion of some replies. Here's the translation so you all can come to your own conclusions:

٩ Everyone!

Do you have a bike?

Spring will be here soon

Age: Showa era

Height:166

Lives in Ibaraki Kumamoto

I love to tinker with motorcycles

Comment: Life is once, play this world

If you know nothing of the language, culture, motorcycles, motorcycle gear, etc, I am going to guess there are a lot of really important details that are utterly lost on you.

I know bikes, I know Japanese, and I lived and road in Japan.

The translation is largely accurate (just minor structural stuff that doesn’t matter).

The only content that might matter, and it doesn’t really seem to, are the hashtags for the tweet that were not covered above (roughly “connect with bikers” and “quick biker self-intro”).

While I agree with your general characterization of Google translate when dealing with Japanese content, in this case it did a decent job, largely because the content was very simple and straightforward.

Specifically, even though “Showa ??” was translated accurately, that doesn’t necessarily mean that someone knows what it means (born before Jan 89, that is, the Showa era).

If so, good point!

That being said, this is the Google translation of the tweet in the article:

Minasan ٩ (ˆoˆ) ۶ Do you have a motorcycle? Spring is coming soon Age: Showa ○○○ Height: 166 Living: Ibaraki I love: messing around with bikes

Like I said in my last comment, I know Google translate is far from perfect and I'm very open to being proven wrong, but I have a hard time believing that there's some deep insight in this post when that is what Google translate put put out. The translation seems pretty "influencer" to me.

And the guy took his money with a straight face and sold him the boots even though the color of the boots signaled he was a trainer or something, which is something the nouveau riche guy had no way of knowing. But it would have been immediately laughable to most people who were in the know.

I am not going to go through the account and try to make up BS, but the bike may be custom built, the gear he's wearing may be amazingly good, the locations he is posting from may be something incredibly special in some way and not commenting on those details may be part of the appeal.

I'm a writer by trade and I get paid by the word and also have to meet other constraints and you can sometimes say very little with three paragraphs or you can say a metric fuck ton with a few well-chosen words.

I absolutely don't know enough about the topic. I just know that when things get popular, it is often due to some value-added detail that no one explicitly talks about. The fact that it gets slipped in and not commented on is part of what makes some things wildly popular.

A density of quality info and yadda is often some element of that and that is often not obvious to outsiders who cannot readily tell that this photo is some superficial tripe and that seemingly similar one is worlds apart in quality, data, informativeness, whatever.

Anyway: This is my insomnia talking. It is absolutely not intended to be ugly or pick a fight or yadda.

You have a great day/night/whatever.

Most of his posts are very casual, but his goal is still to ride the bike rather than fix it everyday so that is the bulk of what he shares. His tone is definitely targeting a less experienced audience. In some of the posts, there's light-hearted trivia about niche topics. He's appealing to a younger generation. Getting new people involved in what looks like an exclusive hobby is always exciting to see online.

All the examples you gave are totally possible. There may be something about the bike or the locations being visited that are special, I really don't know. Even if that is the case, that's not really what OP was claiming and not really what I was responding to.

There are tons of little reasons this account could be popular, but based on the little research I did, I don't think it's because "she" is making posts full of wisdom, years beyond "her" age.

^^ this

Thank you. Wish I could pay you per word for this. [email protected]

A dogwhistle, basically? "Dog whistles use language which appears normal to the majority, but which communicate specific things to intended audiences."

Dogwhistles are most often associated with politics, but the idea goes beyond that (unless you classify all asymmetric/broadcasted communication as political, which is not without merit.)

Of course all of this requires self-drive and personal determination / willingness.

If you don’t to divulge too much on the finance part, I get it.

https://writepay.blogspot.com

That's just one of the things I do. I also blog and do resume work and my blogs get some support from Patreon and tips.

But I have learned a whole lot about writing well doing it on a paid-per-word basis. That's been a real growth experience for me as a writer developing my craft.

These are meaningless differences that only people who don't speak Japanese notice. Because once you do, you'd know that the text being in English instead of Japanese is already such a large difference that picking at individual words doesn't mean anything. (And honorifics definitely don't mean much. Even if you "leave them in" for "correctness", that actually means leaving in the ones the kids know and taking out the ones they don't.)

Actually one of the translators for a lot of popular works recently left Twitter because kids kept harassing him because he was "wrong" because the official work didn't match rumors they'd started based on their incorrect Japanese knowledge. Hope he's not doing that.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15123833

Fwiw, being born in the Showa era (ended Jan 89) would put her at 31 as a minimum.

Minor nitpick, but I just noticed the Showa ?? birth year in the tweet, and that would have raised red flags for me. Even for Japan, the doctored pic doesn’t really look 31, much less mid-30s or older.

Edit: Your translation is mostly correct (The second line is more like “Do you bike?”, but it sounds more natural in Japanese).

Note that this tweet also has a self-intro for motorcyclists hashtag.

The shift from 20s to 30s for females in Japan is generally not a welcome one — pressure to marry, have kids, “settle down”, etc. are very real. It is also perceived that women in their 30s are not as “cute” (something often sought after, especially by public entertainment figures).

Or if someone is just privacy conscious about details that may be used to steal their identity, they may have just randomly chose January 1, 1970 or whatever was the top choice on the little menu.

Even if a person is a simple product of their times, as one gets older that gets increasingly interesting. Because the times change so much over the years.

"Middle age is the period of age beyond young adulthood but before the onset of old age."

"Meaning something" personally and "being interesting" are not the same.

Also there isn't that much wrong with just exploiting popularity machine. So a bunch of people thought you were a young girl, and you're not... who cares! If anything you are teaching people to stop putting so much credence into the SM sphere... which can only be good.

Edit: the power output curve is also not for the faint of heart and there's no electronic helpers, overall very different to ride compared to a current 600cc model with all the bells and whistles :-)

That said... when Jonathan Goldsmith was auditioning for part of The Most Interesting Man in the World, the ad agency called his agent and said, "We really like him, but we think he might be too old," and she replied (quite masterfully), "How could the Most Interesting Man in the World be young?", implying it would take a lifetime to acquire the achievements.

So I guess the answer is, be old and good-looking, like Goldsmith, or Sean Connery.

They are not, but I think people will get better at realizing this the way many now know what it means for something to be "photoshopped" whether they can identify it and subsequently dismiss it or not.

I believe that physical "good" looks, analytical and social intelligence, trade and athletic skill, and artistic talent will eventually converge as our future "stars."

Those are not truly useful skills anywhere except this one ecosystem.

We’re at the stock market has gotten competition from cryptocurrency’s, and social media becomes less service oriented and more of a layer.

Sort of like photoshop enthusiasts knew about and admired skill in the tool but the public generally had little familiarity.

As photo manipulation became common “photoshopped” as an idea was more commonly understood.

James Bond is like The Dread Pirate Roberts and gets played by someone new every few years. Only the name stays the same.

Maybe this Maybe that

This type of argument is toxic. Adds little to the conversation. If you can back any of these maybes that would be great...

I have many relatives and friends who are amazing at skiing. My cousin posts pictures every winter of the sick lines he skis down.

I'm neither an excellent marksman nor skier, but I don't think it would be difficult to become excellent at both given an excessive amount of free time within a few years.

I can though drive a manual very well, own a sports car, and have no fear of drifting it.

A coworker of mine was a pro skydiver, and recommended it to everyone. I've met other skydivers as well; it's supposedly easy and affordable.

Another coworker owned his own plane. Planes are costly but he wasn't James Bond rich...

My brother-in-law owns a few hundred guns including fully automatic weapons.

Being James Bond is a bit idiotic in real life as he engages in a lot of high risk stuff, but it is certainly doable.

I remember reading an article in the French press, about two women founders that mailed the off-site dev team under the moniker of Mike and Bob.

They were fed up with being second guessed on business decisions and had found out that 'Bob' was getting less pushback than 'Marissa'.

My general heuristic is online personas from attractive people are often over valued (specifically considering the value of things they say/do - not their ability to make money which is huge) and when you compare pretty people with high follower numbers to unattractive people (or just people that don't lead with their prettiness) with high follower numbers, the latter are often better quality/say more interesting things. Someone leading with their prettiness has a big advantage in getting attention, even if what they say is dumb.

There's a lot of pseudo-intellectualized bullshit on twitter that gets a lot more attention than it would otherwise because the person is young and pretty, but would not get nearly the same attention if they looked different.

It reminds me a lot of Liking What You See: A Documentary, which is the last Ted Chiang story in his first short story collection - I think it's worth reading.

Obviously attractiveness is only one factor among many, but I suspect it's a much bigger factor than people currently think.

https://www.businessinsider.com/most-popular-youtubers-with-...

It's also telling how male the list is.

The top 26 list of YouTubers is filled with influential people, and many people would say that they’re influencers, but they’re not typical examples.

And that "skill" is based almost entirely on being attractive.

And these days, with camera and video filters, even that's not necessary any more.

In the old world of professional climbing, when the magazines decided who was worthy of attention and accolades, sponsorships were generally handed out according to merit.

Now days, sponsorship is shifting more and more to climbers who are media friendly and good at drawing attention to themselves. Top tier climbers are now refashioning themselves into mediocre youtube celebrities, with mixed results.

Pewdiepie was obsessed with having the most subscribers. Mr. Beast did little else than obsess over the Youtube algorithm for many years on end.

I wonder if this is at play with these two cases?

For actual enjoyment, if a video starts begging for "like subscribe share" I just turn it off. I have no idea why people like watching other people begging impersonally for attention.

Plenty of good creators do this (as it works), just to keep up with their peers. It really has nothing to do with the quality of the rest of their content. Don’t blame the player, blame the game IMO

I would far rather pay an honest few cents for a page view or a video roll than be subjected to in-content advertising and begging from the creators. Certainly, creators would prefer to do their thing instead of beg and scrape.

What can we do to accelerate micropayment tech and patronage communities for creators?

You're not wrong though. Most creators probably hate asking for stuff.

> far rather pay an honest few cents for a page view or a video roll

I don't think this holds true for most people. PPV TV has always been kind of a minor thing, and eclipsed now by all-you-can-stream services. The feeling of continually inserting coins, or the taxi meter running, is uncomfortable to many people.

This is true, but I think fails to be a good counter-example. PPV has always been expensive and focused on single events. What we haven’t seen is AWS style small payments.

Imagine if instead of paying $100/mo for cable TV, we could pay $0.25/hr. If you watched TV 24x7, you’d pay more, but the vast majority of people would pay much less.

The main problem with smaller amount PPV and micro transactions in general is that it is hard to get the billing/accounting right. But this is something that could vendors get right. You only pay for what you use, and what you get is billed in small enough increments that it makes sense for everyone involved.

How this could be applied to online videos, I’m not sure.

Micropayment news services have existed (Blendle). Unpopular.

Pay-as-you-go prepaid cell phone service is also niche. So is the a-la-carte gym membership. It's not that billing/accounting is difficult. It's that it plain straight up makes less money. SAAS vs one-time upgrades, etc.

The reason for that is that it's much more expensive than paying by the month. I wanted pay-as-you-go specifically because I have nearly zero need for cell service, but would prefer to be reachable even if I'm not at home.

But you can't get a pay-as-you-go plan with pay-as-you-go pricing. T-mobile's monthly plan now is "$15" (actually something like $16.60) per month. The pay-as-you-go plan would cost less than that, given usage rates, except that it also costs $1 for each day you use it to any degree. The incredibly high minimum fee overwhelms the already small advantage of not paying for service you don't use -- as soon as you use any service, you get charged for more than a full day of every service, and then you have to pay a usage rate on top of that!

Make them nonprofit foundations democratically run rather than middlemen biding their time until they can increase their margins or sell to a megacorp.

Personally I refuse to do this and my channel on youtube still grows but it is probably growing a lot slower than if I had been begging.

Since I do it for fun and not profit I couldn't give a damn though.

He is the only one I can think of that doesn't do this and it makes me personally much more inclined to watch him. He also feels "uncommercial" even after 10 years I think it's fantastic that he is able to keep it that way.

While I haven't taken time to measure this out to academic standards, it's extremely obvious in niche interest channels - eg I'm into synthesizers, and there's a whole little subsystem of review videos, technique videos, not-talking demos, jam sessions etc. The more heavily branded/self-promoting presenters tend to get vastly more views. My favorite reviewer centers the equipment under review and makes occasional appearances talking to the camera, but his maximum views tends to be near the average minimum for reviewers who center themselves, eg always being on-screen in a box, mirror, or direct-to-camera shot and always showing their face and a relevant emotional reaction to the subject of the video in the poster frame. I'm sure the same patterns play out in many other specialist topics.

To some extent this may be a product of the Infamous Algorithm, but it might also reflect cognitive preferences of viewers in that many people prefer to have information mediated by a recognizable presenter whose reactions and emphases become more meaningful with repeated views, while others like me find an overly-expressive presenter distracts from the material under discussion and gravitate towards a more subdued/restrained communication style.

In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan distinguishes between 'hot' and 'cool' media which employ more or less intensity to solicit and maintain attention. 'Hot' styles with a charismatic and overtly solicitous presenter seem to be more popular in general, so even people who don't like that style may end up adopting it to gain viewership in a competitive market. There might be a market opportunity here for catering to different kinds of viewers, eg a 'CoolTube' for people who strongly prefer a more low-key presentation format.

Incidentally, I sometimes do prefer hot 'in-your-face' sort of media, especially on things like experimental music videos or the occasional guilty pleasure of a cheesy monster movie. It's just a hunch, but it seems to depend on things like a rapid tempo of editing and high levels of discontinuity/unpredictability rather than spatial maximalism.

Same here. There are some YouTube channels I really want to watch and follow as I can learn new skills from them, but the constant begging and over-dramatization is a real turnoff so I cannot watch it without feeling bad about it.

I have a similar feeling about people who takes photos of themselves all the time and their social feed is filled with the photos they take of themselves. I can't take a photo of myself without feeling vain, and I'm getting passive-vain feelings when I see friends of mine posting selfie after selfie of themselves...

I also recommend this blog post about the best way to ask for subscribers: https://reneritchie.net/how-to-get-subscribers-on-youtube-ev...

I've never done any of these things, and I'm not sure I have the stomach for it, but I consider it required knowledge for anyone with any interest in leveraging online attention.

My point was simply that I find it unappealing pleasure viewing, so I don't understand wanting to watch them do it.

I am aware two things:

1.) If they earn money from youtube, they need likes and subscriptions so that youtube algoritm shows them to more people.

2.) I as a programmer earn more money with less effort then them. I also very likely have to deal with less bs (like harassments and jerks trying to insult you or take you down for lolz).

A combination makes me accept that these people are doing entertainment as work, I consume that entertainment for free and thus am absolutely fine with them trying to succeed.

There is also absolutely nothing wrong with entertainers wanting attention. That is what pays their bills, without attention they cant be successful. Attention is not dirty word to me.

Lots of educational channels I watch do it, and I fully understand why they do it.

I mean really? Do creators realize that viewers could be interested in several dozen channels and don't want to swamp out their own notifications since Youtube's prioritization gets shittier the more you subscribe to? Sorry you aren't in my top 10? Maybe a video got popular on an algorithmic whim...

I'd much rather they ask me to join a Patreon, which I am very keen to do if the content is good and continues to do so. But pulling that "peek behind the creator curtain" crap puts me very off because it's like trying to shame you into behaving differently as if you're part of the problem.

No... you decided to make Youtube your source of income. I don't owe you crap.

It’s actually a problem with all “favorites” on every platform. A browser bookmark system with notifications (a little dot) would be great, because then you can sort/categorize/describe/thimbnail/speeddial it, but platforms crave for stupidity and make it a non-configurable list instead.

I used to as well but realized platforms like YouTube effectively force the creators to do it.

I do too, but not without first hitting the dislike button. I only wish others would do the same.

People who don't say those words exist, but you won't find them very easily. There's a reason for that.

Nagging and soliciting subs and likes is fucking annoying. If you want me to like a video, make a good video and stop nagging.

If I dislike those naggers enough, maybe Google's stupid artificial non-intelligence will eventually learn to recommend only videos from non-naggers. I try, even though I don't have much faith in Google's algorithms.

And here I'm telling that maybe people should stop listening to annoying naggers and just dislike & close the tab, maybe block the channel too if it keeps coming up in recommends.

Want to influence people? Use faceapp to change yourself into a face people feel good seeing (pretty girl strikes the correct neurons in majority of viewers). In the best case limit everybody does this and hopefully it stops being effective. Worst case every influencing person does this anyway?

They effectively play an animated character live and voice it as they perform it's facial expressions.

On the subject of Japanese gender changes, a most interesting one is played by a Japanese female artist who plays a male character that looks like a female once again. — this artist has a particular habit of creating male characters that look as though they be female.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRkO-V29fFw&ab_channel=Spiri...

Why do we even really care about real world appearance, appearance is something that we have very little control over and if we've accidentally created something in the internet that allows folks to escape their appearance can't we just celebrate it?

We seem to be accepting that gender identification and body dysmorphia are both real things that people deal with and this meta-society where you can look however you please is probably a really helpful outlet for those who don't like how people judge their appearance from day-to-day - I think it's important that we preserve this freedom and try and ascend beyond judging people by their meat-bags.

Just to add on that.

"Though women make up 77% of the influencer market, male influencers are paid almost 100% more. " [1]

And 88% of female influencers are less than 34 years old. [2]

So 67 % of influencers are young women (if 34 years old is considered young)

Also women get 10 times more like than men [3]

[1] https://klear.com/blog/influencer-pricing-2019/

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/893733/share-influencers...

[3] https://www.influencerbay.com/blog/the-future-of-influence-i...

This isn't entirely surprising. They're much more rare so there is lot more competition for their services, piled on top of the usual biases in our society against paying women equally.

That's 31% more, not almost 100% more.

But thats how suply-and-demand workforce always work doesn't it? Too much people doing the same job tends to lower the wage for that job; and because a lot of companies compite for different markets when sponsoring a male influencers vs female influencers (e.g. "this is the shaving cream I use" vs "this is the bra's brand I use") they are income-wise 2 different jobs.

I think it depends of your style. Of course I wouldn't want to see an uncle if I were looking for sexy girls being rad, but I would love to see a 50yo uncle tell biking stories, motorcycle repair, or his brand of manly zen.

Definitely no one wants to see an uncle posing as a young girl, and I am also intrigued by why did an uncle wanted that badly to feel admired on Twitter in the first place. Someone younger I would understand.

Say you need a safety warning tables for your railway station - pandas dangerously fussing with selfie sticks on a crowded platform are much more enjoyable and memorable than just some more generic stick figures doing the same.

You can also encode culture into mascots - everyone probably knows the bear mascot Kumamon (yes, there are many bears in Kumamoto and they occasionally eat somebody) but take forever example Shimaneko, the mascot of the Shimano pprefecture. Neko means cat and indeed its a cat mascot - with a strange hat! And that hat is the roof of the ancient and famous Izumo shrine located in the Shimano prefecture.

Or the even more obscure Kinosaki Kounori: https://mobile.twitter.com/jrw_fukuchiyama/status/1046927976...

On the picture you can see a young female anime character in a summer kimono (yukata).

This is the mascot of a limitted express train (!) that goes from Osaka and Kyoto to the famous onsen (hot spring) town of Kinosaki (hence the Kinosaki in the name). The the other name Kounori is from the name of the train, Kou no tori - oriental white stork.

Which goes right back to the founding legend of Kinosaki about how they built the first bath after observing a stork using the natural hot spring to heal its wounds.

And the last thing - the summer kimono/yukata. If you look closely she also has a ticket stamping tool and a railway company employee badge - that's because station employees really do wear yukata in the summer in Kinosaki instead of their usual uniforms! :)

And the kimono pattern includes of course the oriental white stork but also - fireworks! And that's because of course in the summer there are regular fireworks shows in Kinosaki! :)

Really some much culture and symbolism (not to mention hard work!) goes to japanese mascot characters!

https://www.ostan-collections.net/wiki/index.php/List_of_Can...

* not so imaginative, but always consistent and on-model in ways Westerners don't feel any pressure to try for

One interesting side effect of this is that some of the most popular male YouTube channels I follow never show the host's face. Everything is carefully staged to only show their hands / body.

I usually don't watch the whole video as it can get a bit dry, but otherwise it is nice to just see someone expressing themself without shilling their Patreon or using clickbait thumbnails and titles like the more commercial "personal" channels do.

(BBC radio is at the very opposite end from begging for likes; once someone establishes a show, if it's not in a highly contended timeslot it can basically run forever no matter how obscure or unfashionable it is, until the presenter dies)

https://www.youtube.com/user/featony

Although there was one where you did get to see his face.

AvE? Just hands.

Marco Reps? Just hands... wearing gloves.

LockPickingLawyer? Just hands.

BosnianBill? Just hands.

The Signal Path? Largely just hands, although he has appeared occasionally.

Wendover Productions? Disembodied voice.

CGP Grey? Disembodied voice.

Real Engineering? Disembodied voice.

Not to mention innumerable video game streamers.

Of course, disembodied voices aren't in-and-of-themselves a new cultural phenomenon: Radio has existed for years, as have podcasts. And there are TV formats like nature and history documentaries where the narrator may rarely or never appear on screen.

And even on Youtube, there are a number of female voice-only celebrities - for example "vtubers", where a female voice actor plays games while pretending to be a cute anime girl. Of course, one could say that's an example for the theory people want to see beautiful women, not against

As far as privacy it doesn't necessarily apply because the famous ones almost all have previous careers as face streamers, and their fans know who they are since they use their real voices. But if you are doing it to hide yourself then it works, and it means that everyone else can interact with you and seem to be in the same world.

I watch art, some crafts occasionally tech and pop commentary. Some sport.

I dont see people being interested in 50 years old women either in general.

No doubt people felt good about following "her" because of her authenticity.

Although sometimes amateur models don't realize what the job of a model is, or they get groomed by fake photographers and end up making bad softcore porn by accident.

Also, 50 year old people tend to have ideas which are frowned upon in the Valley. Especially if they're not from the US.

So when enough people start following them, they get removed.

Now you're an alt-right sexist person and anyone subscribing to your channel is one step away from shooting a school.

The internet changed that.

Now it's a function of perceived popularity and perceived influence. That has become a (cheap?) proxy. It's not the person per se, but the "social proof" attached to that person.

We've been trained to use quantity instead of quality. Is that human nature?

Attacted to a pretty face? Yes. That is human nature.

It would be great to see Adolfo Mateo[0] as a 20 year old Japanese girl, not that he needs any improvement as he is.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/SMOKERSOFCIGARSPIPES

It happens to be a skill that influences require for their work.

Here, I see no problem; where I see a problem is that often those who hire judge those on their beauty where their beauty would play no factor in their performance, not only hurting those whom they would hire, but their own finances in the processes.

Of course, the scariest part of all is how much more easily the ugly are found guilty on the same level of evidence than the beautiful.

And while there is a skill to "beautifying up" people, that only works to a certain degree and can't change the looks you were born with, it can only enhance/hide them in parts.

But you can't learn to uncrook your nose just like you can't remove your acne scars trough learning or straighten out your ears. These things don't require learning a skill, they require surgical procedures you most likely can't perform on yourself even if you had the skills to do so.

As I said, any skill has a component of talent and acquisition.

Most men can train their entire lives and will never have the skill at chess José Capablanca had when he was six, simply from watching others play the game. — every world chess champion that ever lived was born with talent of the game most others can only dream of.

> But you can't learn to uncrook your nose just like you can't remove your acne scars trough learning or straighten out your ears. These things don't require learning a skill, they require surgical procedures you most likely can't perform on yourself even if you had the skills to do so.

Just as an average man cannot ever reach the level that chess grandmasters had when they were 8 years old, even if he trained for his entire life.

This is a massive exaggeration. There's no way it's true.

> Just as an average man cannot ever reach the level that chess grandmasters had when they were 8 years old, even if he trained for his entire life.

I found the results of the world chess championship 2018 U10. [1] The best ones of the 10-year-old kids here are rated slightly higher than 2000 elo. And 8-year-old ones play significantly worse. (Also with the Internet these kids have access to all the knowledge in the world and typically have top coaches which Capablanca hadn't.) Do you really think it's impossible to reach 1900-2000 fide for an average man who trains the entire life?

[1] https://info64.org/world-cadets-chess-championships-2018-u10...

It is indeed only an undocumented family story of the family that is hard to prove. However, such things as that Bobby Fisher at the age of 13 played what is now known as The Game of The Century against the best North American player at the time to victory, or that Capablanca beat the Cuban Chess Champion at the age of 11 are documented facts in history.

These chess prodigies amassed skills in the game at very young ages that most could never achieve in their lifetime.

> I found the results of the world chess championship 2018 U10. [1] The best ones of the 10-year-old kids here are rated slightly higher than 2000 elo.

And none of them will rise to the exceptional levels of Capablanca or Fischer, will they, many of them will be forgotten and never become professional to begin with.

Apart from that, 2000 Elo is already a higher rating than many serious club players will ever achieve. 2000 elo is candidate master level.

> Do you really think it's impossible to reach 1900-2000 fide for an average man who trains the entire life?

The average man? absolutely. Those that train their entire life are already 90% skill in chess.

And that's hardly the issue, even if he could if he trained his entire life, the exceptional professional players in chess that so earn their livelihood achieved 2000 at around 8-9 years old. 2000 is not close to a level that allows one to play chess professionally, for which 2550 is probably needed these days.

Most human beings on the planet lack the talent to ever be a professional chess player, no matter how hard they train, — it is no different from tennis, football, darts, or beauty.

I certainly would.

I know this is being perceived as "fraud" right now, but the same people who were attracted to that person and now feel betrayed are overdue for some well-deserved self reflection.

It's hard to make an argument that the world would be worse off if everyone could just have the body they want. Regrettably, I was born too late to live to see it become reality.

Older men chasing younger woman and replacing their previous wives? Completely unnecessary.

Child sex crimes? Someone can just morph into a child and hook up with someone with the same interest.

Unattractive but a good personality / similar interests? Not a problem.

Trans? Just morph into a woman / man.

Marketers have known this for years before the appearance of "influencers" - youth sells, and a young women have better cross-gender appeal than young men. Go ahead an open any pre-WWW paper magazine, count the number of women vs. men who appear in the adverts for non-gendered products

And the commenter didn't say "only". Yes, people follow non-sexual influencers all the time, but it's much easier to get followers if you're sexually attractive.

There have been plenty of times during history during which nobody cared what young people thought. I'd venture to say the majority of it.

I also don't think there is an issue here.

Is this actually true, or just bias from your own interessts? If we look at technical stuff and gaming, we see far more successful male influencers. Similar with entertainment-industry.

> and only a minority would want to follow a 50 year old

This more or less is true, because not many like to see unattractive people doing boring things. But the point here is, this in not because of gender or sex, it's about the quality of content and chemistry with the consumers. An old ugly guy without any real skill, would be usually as unsuccesful as an old ugly woman without any real skill. Though, for both there always is chance to find niche to sellout your content over something, the chance is pretty low.

With younger and more attractive people, the chances are significant higher, because they have more selling points besides the content itself, thus they sell better. But it also depends on the target-group and content.

> it’s human nature

No, it's human culture. People sell according to the crowds reception on what the gender is suposed to do. So woman sell better in female-stuff, men better with manly stuff. Woman do have a slight advantage, in that they are the gender which in most cultures is educated from early days to sellout. They dress up, use fancy cloths, catter to the people, etc. This works better for laymen when becoming influencers, because woman have more likely the skills to sell themself on a broader are, while most men need to learn it first.

Cute women doing traditionally "male things" sells like hot cakes. Not so much the other way around.

True, but are really bad in selling serious Business stuff.

In both cases, I think it would be fair to call that niche real skill.