Influencers as the future of culture is not great. Hollywood had a ton of issues but it at least had some... class? If you watch an interview with Mr. Beast or other famous influencers they are concerningly ignorant, have little self-awareness and a child-like approach to reality. It makes total sense given these are teenagers who were lauded with fame for entertaining other teenagers on social media.

I watched the Mr. Beast episode of David Letterman's show, and I had no expectations but figured he must have some charisma as the most watched youtube person. He was unable to explain basic concepts, had no self-awareness, and generally seemed detached from any sort of reality. It was shocking to think that is who is shaping young peoples minds.

“but it at least had some... class” Not if you’d have asked the WASPs at the time, they very much looedk down on Hollywood. Saw it as vulgar and beneath them for many of the same reasons people dislike MrBeast. The 'class' only came afterwards.

The movie industry was, for much of the 20th century, split between production in Hollywood and finance in New York. Probably the last gasp of that was Marvel, where, for a long time, the merch and comic people in New York made the final decisions.

Which is weird cause it's all but certain MrBeast will be president in the near future. But maybe they just don't view the president as classy?

I think things like "classiness," "grace," and "tact" are all but dead, both in Hollywood and across the population. Everyone seems to be mentally teenagers, but in middle-age bodies.

I understand this sentiment. When I look at my own life, one culture constant has been the decline of "formalism" -- dress, language, jobs, inter-generational relationships, privacy. If anything, the average YouTuber is a pretty average person -- not too good looking, not too well coached by a PR team, not too well dressed. Isn't this a cultural "win" because we are getting more authentic content, instead of ~10 major TV networks and film studios deciding who we should watch?

Yep. But give it a few decades for the money to figure out how to wall off outsiders, insulate their little cadres of influencers and firm up networks of fake and real methods to direct popularity.

Still - probably better than Hollywood in the long run, and more accessible, even in the hellish direction it will undoubtedly go.

> Hollywood had a ton of issues but it at least had some... class?

It looked that way because they had media training and their public personas were carefully managed, with staged interviews and media appearances. Behind the scenes, it’s a different story.

Influencers are rewarded for seeming authentic. Mr Beast coming across badly in a traditional TV interview just makes his audience think he’s more real.

Yes you're describing class.

I would disagree. If you have no class in private, you have no class.

And how is this is different from movie stars?

A lot of movie stars seem very intelligent and quite conscientious people to me. The directors even more so.

> Hollywood had a ton of issues but it at least had some... class?

Hollywood took a bribe from the tobacco industry to make smoking "cool" and infect our nation with cigarettes.

> have little self-awareness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mpUxn7NybY : "A big opportunity for us is that there are no gatekeepers. There's no one I have to convince to let me do things."

:-)

> Hollywood took a bribe from the tobacco industry to make smoking "cool" and infect our nation with cigarettes.

I think the whole world took up smoking because of Hollywood.

For actors it was "took a bribe" for influencers it is modus operandi.

'Class','taste' etc these are all very subjective. One could argue that Mr Beast built all of his fame from scratch and didnt have it handed to him or having to sleep with some powerful gatekeeper - something you can't say about all your 'classy' hollywood stars. If you go back a century you can probably find people kvetching about the lack of class of these new fangled movie people compared to the theater stars of their day (who actually had to know how to act)

Hollywood actors being vapid idiots is a trope, or rather reality, as old as Hollywood. Every time they go on Letterman they have to carefully follow the script written for them to avoid embarrassing themselves and the industry. And they often fail at that.

BTW, actors are very often prostitutes. Have been since ancient times and the association has stuck. Mediterranean yachts are packed full of C-lister actresses/hookers. Not to mention most of them get jobs by sleeping with producers, which is just an indirect form of prostitution. I don't know about you, but classy is the last way I'd describe Jennifer Lawrence sucking Weinstein's dick.

When I was a kid, I used to world WWF (World Wrestling Federation) with my best friend. We loved the interviews (pre/post "fight"). Those guys were idiots and certainly "detached from any sort of reality", but also very funny to 10 year old boys! I also liked Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. I turned out just fine.

To use anecdotes of specific influencers or even to cultural short/med-term memes misses the OP’s fundamental point in saying

> “this is the future of culture”.

The point is that the future of “culture” is increasingly decentralized; that the ability or more aptly, the opportunity, to accumulate “cultural influence” will tend towards higher entropy as a direct repercussion to the proliferation of the means to accumulate it.

Put differently, as the hardware and software used to record, store, and share content become more widely accessible, anyone with the access and motivation to use the tools truly has the opportunity to become famous.

If one of America's main exports is culture, why would you ban factor inputs?

They're also not fungible and extremely mobile. People get attached to specific OF stars and the medium inherently requires remote work. So it's an inherently global labour force that protectionism won't help. American OF models won't magically make more money if you ban immigration unless you also ban cultural imports.

The government isn't displacing local talent by importing OF models and gets tax dollars for essentially doing nothing. Those tax dollars pay for schools/hospitals/etc.

OF also skews towards young, unmarried women, which balances the gender surplus of unmarried men that generally tries to immigrate. Since they're young, they also have more productivity before drawing on benefits like Medicare or Social Security.

By any objective standard OF models are the ideal migrant.

This seems more like importing culture. These content creators aren't coming to work or American creators, they are coming to America to create their content for American audiences or using American resources.

...I get this is HN but come on. It is just modern day JasminCam for lonely men that are being exploited through parasocial relationships. It is the opposite of productive. You just have society feeding on itself.

> exploited

Isn’t that a derogatory stereotype? Aren’t those men (and women and other folks) as “exploited” as a reader of a book or a player of a game, who understands they’re about to be a part of a fantasy but willingly suspend the disbelief for a short while?

It’s only exploitation if this suspension of disbelief is artificially prolonged in nefarious way, with a self-reinforcing fantasy so the person loses touch with the reality and spends increasingly unhealthy amounts of time in a fantasy, or otherwise get conditioned and start to exhibit addiction-like behaviors that aren’t in their best long-term interests.

That happens (every entertainment industry has its whales), but saying it’s the norm (rather than a pathological extremity) is sort of stigmatizing.

Parasocial relationships are inherently exploitive.

Are all transactions on OF inherently a parasocial relationship? If a dude wants to jerk his schmeat to somebody he thinks is attractive, and pays for access to the media without otherwise engaging, is that parasocial?

You could do that for free. Most are obviously looking for more.

It kind of sounds like you are trying to justify whatever it is you are doing, in which case you do you. I don't actually care what you do and neither should you care what I think.

> You could do that for free. Most are obviously looking for more.

And everyone can use Pornhub for free, yet Pornhub still makes money on their premium subscriptions. Are those also parasocial relationships?

> It kind of sounds like you are trying to justify whatever it is you are doing, in which case you do you.

You know I thought about putting the obligatory "I don't use OF" in my first comment, but felt it wouldn't be necessary. I see that it was; by the way have you stopped beating your wife?

I am going to push back here. I follow a variety of YouTubers, and I'm pretty sure that I have a parasocial relationship with most of them. I never heard the term before I watched a Tom Scott video about it. It made perfect sense me, and I saw it in myself. Literally, sometimes I talk to the screen, like we're in the room together. But it's only entertainment, and it's a fun way to "escape" after a long day at the office. I don't take it too seriously. Am I being exploited by a channel of funny people in their 20/30s who fix cars, or lift weights, or talk about relationship problems? I don't think so.

It should be stigmatized.

Consent does not bless immoral acts or neutralize damage. A person who takes a drug voluntarily is still being harmed by it. It causes changes in the consumer whether he likes it or not. Causality does not care about your consent.

(And to address your analogy to books, the content of a work of fiction also matters. Reading bad books isn't good for your mind either. But literary fiction at least has the potential to be good. The genre isn't categorically bad.)

And porn is addictive. Porn addiction is extremely widespread and afflicts mostly young men. Porn's ubiquity and the easy with which it can be accessed has created a situation that did not exist before, and from a young age. And not only is it addictive, but it does real psychological damage to these consumers, creating what some call "porn brain". It is an excellent method for producing sexually-crippled creeps and incels unable - and even uninterested, given the nature of their "fantasy" - to have healthy relationships with real human beings, and the stats corroborate this.

It is an incredibly twisted and deranging vice. It destroys individuals and has a destructive impact on society as a whole.

> A person who takes a drug voluntarily is still being harmed by it. It causes changes in the consumer whether he likes it or not.

I’m afraid you’re oversimplifying it. If only things would be this simple. They just never are.

Every experience causes changes (it’s the whole point). And every stimulating experience has a potential to skew your behaviors towards having more of it. Some more, some less, of course, but anything can become a passion and get unhealthy so.

There’s this fine distinction between someone who does something now and then, without significant impairment to their decision-making abilities that cause over-favoring such actions, and those who fail to notice it in time and become overtly obsessed with something.

It’s not about what you do - you can be watching porn or going hiking (or whatever most people would naively deem “good”) - anything can become unhealthy.

I think I understand your point, though. Indeed, pornography consumption nature is intimate and that leaves less opportunities for feedback and self-introspection. That is, noticing the point it becomes more of an obsession. However, dismissing it under a simple “porn is bad” (a tempting idea) is short-sighted by dismissing any nuances, and also harmful - just in different ways (through stigmatization).

>It is just modern day JasminCam for lonely men that are being exploited through parasocial relationships. It is the opposite of productive.

You can make all the moral judgments you like, but the fact is: They're making money either way, and then spending that money in their local communities. They can spend that money (and pay taxes on it) in the US or not.

It's no different economically than a musician or an actor doing the same.

It was not a moral judgement.

There is a reason why "the oldest profession" is a polite idiom for prostitution.

Calling it "parasocial", doesn't change what it is, but the technology as a mediator does. And society has been feeding on itself since we moved past hunter gatherers.

>There is a reason why "the oldest profession" is a polite idiom for prostitution.

The term only gained popularity at the start of the 1900s, it's a proto-meme

> why Hollywood became the Earth's center of cultural gravity post-WW2

The reason why Hollywood even exists is because it was a way of escaping the enforcement of patents and royalties. And it is easy being the cultural center of the western world when everything other cultural-relevant city in the western hemisphere is somewhat in ruins. Other than that, the lettering is a racist monument of a bygone era.

> You may argue that these people aren't of such import, but I would beg to differ

I'm not a US citizen, but lets face it - there is some irony in seeing some scientists fleeing for abroad offers, some probably deported, and having influencers or glorified strippers benefiting from some ill-thought program.

> These people shape the culture that the young people around you consume.

Do you have kids? I do. People don't give 2 f** about Hollywood or their "stars". Maybe in america. We have our own clowns here, and 15 minutes of fame doesn't require being predated on by some director (thankfully). My daughter couldn't name a single actor even if she wanted to - because movies are (mostly) dead, and series are a commodity. And I'm not saying this as some weirdo who doesn't own a TV or something - we have Disney, SkyShowTime, HBO, Amazon, etc. Its just "kids dont care about that anymore".

> They create the memes of six-seven-ification So, do you know what that means exactly? Are you a Skrilla’s fan? Just asking, because from the tone of your response, you seem to have no idea of the meaning - just like kids saying "theez nuts" or whatever.

I think you misunderstood GP's point, that it's now the _influencers_ and social media stars who are shaping culture. Not Hollywood or its stars.

I disagree. I think the attention economy is a new, parallel universe of fame. Yes, old Hollywood and new social media interact and affect each other, but they are still fairly independent. Most Hollywood actors don't have a very large social media presence -- it is probably mostly managed by their PR team. And few social media influencers make it in Hollywood as actors or actresses.

Another reason why US media is so dominant: It has the largest population of any English-majority speaking nation. Another thing: English is the second language for an large portion of people under 40 in the world.

I remember when I first learned about the size of the Japenese media market (TV, film, music). It is ENORMOUS. I could not understand how, as 99% of Japanese language speakers live in Japan. Then I realised that Japan is highly developed (wealthy) and has a huge internal market of ~120 million people.

    > My daughter couldn't name a single actor even if she wanted to

I doubt it. You should ask her. If she is 10 years or older, she certainly has some favourites. If she has social media, ask her who she follows. I am sure there are a bunch of actors & actresses in her list. I'm not saying this to pass any judgement on you as a parent. Only that I doubt the authenticity of your statement.

> I doubt it. You should ask her. If she is 10 years or older, she certainly has some favourites. If she has social media, ask her who she follows. I am sure there are a bunch of actors & actresses in her list

16 and nope, she doesnt really care about actors/actresses as she doesnt really follow tv/cinema/streaming; she consumes mostly youtube,f1 and korean stuff. From what I've seen, this is not uncommon.

I sense that "Korean stuff" contains actors and or actresses

I have no judgement on these models. Everyone can make money through legal means as they deem fit.

But at the same time, the immigration system historically penalized anyone who engages in prostitution and actively denied entry to people found to be engaged in it. There is an explicit question about this in all immigration forms. Which is why it’s surprising that O-1 visas are being awarded to OnlyFans models. Maybe OF isn’t prostitution according to how it’s being interpreted, but it’s very surprising.

If OnlyFans is not prostitution (and in my understanding it is not), then I don't see why it is surprising?

Idk if you mean it literally but conflating the sort of prostitution they ask about on immigration forms with taking naked pictures of yourself seems very wrong.

Disclaimer: I don't mean this comment as an insult to you or anyone else here. It's meant to be slightly tongue in cheek.

I hate to be that person, but the fact that so many people on HN think OF is prostitution is revealing of the site's demographics (i.e. older). It is, as some may put it, boomer thinking.

You're misunderstanding what these people - esports athletes, successful streamers, influencers, OF models etc - actually do. They create and maintain parasocial relationships.

The point isn't just the gameplay or nudes / sex videos or commentary. For e.g., I (and a bunch of other young women for some reason) love to watch Temet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go8EJbNaIHg while working. It's the way they reflect back to their audience and allow them to become a part of their performance.

It's kind of like the place where everyone knows your name? These are digital third places and the content (whether it be neon blue bunny hopping characters or a graphic video of someone having sex) is a mechanism for bonding / a part of the activity. Kind of like the alcohol at the pub, I suppose.

That's where real influence comes from in this age.

If you think OF is prostitution, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what will drive power and culture in this century.

It’s not the boomer thinking, it’s just mostly talking about semantics. Prostitution is defined as engaging in sexual activity in exchange for payment, which is frowned upon in the immigration system.

Is being in a sugar daddy/baby relationship a form prostitution? Is paying money for a custom private show online where the OF model performs all kinds of sexual acts prostitution? Does prostitution require physical contact? Thats the question of semantics that I am curious about re:immigration.

And these questions aren’t “Boomer mentality”. There is precedent in asking for clear definitions. Sweden makes a distinction between pre recorded only fans work, which is akin to pornography and custom shows which are criminalized, akin to prostitution. https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2025-06-10/swe...

There's a strong parasocial element to traditional prostitution, although it's used more by high-end "escorts" who deliberately cultivate conversational skills. So none of this is new.

"My default strategy was this: I would invite the man in, we’d sit down and talk for a while. I’d establish physical contact in the conversation by touching his hand when laughing at a joke, or crossing my leg so it bumped into his. I would become increasingly charmed, utterly fascinated by his life, and I asked him to explain to me concepts I already knew (remember, they like you smart in order to validate their identity as a man who likes smart women, and they still love teaching you things)."

https://knowingless.com/2021/10/19/becoming-a-whorelord-the-...

> I hate to be that person, but the fact that so many people on HN think OF is prostitution is revealing of the site's demographics (i.e. older). It is, as some may put it, boomer thinking.

Well it's not non-existent either, there are a fair number of onlyfans models (and also general actors in the field of pornography who do the same) who do escorting on the side.

“There are a fair number of people in X field who do Y on the side” is a completely and radically different things than “X is a subset of Y.”

how would it be interpreted as prostitution? the close analogue is porn stars right

Well Sweden sure thinks it could be a form of prostitution. While Some form of OF is similar to pornography (pre recorded shows) other is similar to prostitution and therefore illegal (paying for custom live sexual acts). Obviously Sweden isn’t US, but it’s not as clear as “OF is just porn”.

https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2025-06-10/swe...

Porn comes from pornē, Greek for prostitute. So at least etymologically (and arguably logically as both involve sex for money) porn is prostitution.

If that’s accepted, then I find it hard not to also accept OF as a form of prostitution.

School comes from skholē, Greek for "leisure" or "spare time.".

Therefore people can't be stressed for finals at university, since it's all leisure!

“Etymologically, X comes from Y, therefore X is a form of Y” is quite the jump in logic...

Why should prostitutes not be allowed to immigrate to the US?

That is beyond my pay grade. I’m just stating how the immigration system has worked historically.

Because their abilities are not in the extraordinary artistic abilities category. It's not Hollywood, it's Florida.

But influencers are by default distributed and don't really need to be in a single place. Most of their collabs are in luxurious venues around the world (Because we live in a world worshipping rich stuff but that s another matter)

Plus AI porn is already a thing

Man we're making some giant leaps equating early Hollywood talent with a bunch of modern day internet hoes.

Are we? It feels the same just this time you're the old person and it's your turn to disapprove instead of being in the cultural wave.

The argument from cinema is flaky and a moral critique of Hollywood's influence is unavoidable. But we're talking about porn here, not cinema. This is decadence and depravity. How can you confuse cinema with the construction of an international whoredom? The numbers are also incommensurate.

And TikTok is the antithesis of culture. It's consumerist rubbish that encourages a vapid, thoughtless, and illiterate consumption of shallow material. The article even mentions the monetary motivations of those posting. Any gimmick will do just to make a buck.

Let us not relativize culture. If you relativize it, then your argument falls apart anyway. Authentic culture serves human beings. It involves learning from, developing, deepening, refining, and correcting what came before. Trash content doesn't do this. It is cultural poison. It ruins people's minds and wrecks society.

This use of O-1 visas is merely another sign of the downward trajectory of our polity. We are following Plato's description of social decline perfectly. Perhaps aesthetically, it is fitting that Trump is the poster boy of this abuse of O-1 visas, but he is at best an emanation and a catalyst of broader and deeper social and cultural processes. In the absence of a minimum of sound moral authority, you can expect the poison that lurks in the mud to hatch out and begin to dominate the polis.

>And TikTok is the antithesis of culture. It's consumerist rubbish that encourages a vapid, thoughtless, and illiterate consumption of shallow material. The article even mentions the monetary motivations of those posting. Any gimmick will do just to make a buck.

My brother, you've just described modern American culture perfectly.

What's the difference between Hollywood popcorn films and corn?

> Let us not relativize culture. If you relativize it, then your argument falls apart anyway. Authentic culture serves human beings. It involves learning from, developing, deepening, refining, and correcting what came before. Trash content doesn't do this. It is cultural poison. It ruins people's minds and wrecks society.

The walls of Pompeii beg to differ.

https://pompeiiarchaeologicalpark.com/social-norms-and-eroti...

https://mariasorensen.substack.com/p/the-forbidden-erotic-ar...

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/archaeology/a627393...

I am sure there would have been people at the time decrying the creation of pigments and paints as the fall of civilization due to "decadence and depravity." Didn't matter much, did it?

> We are following Plato's description of social decline perfectly

Plato was a wrestler. Plato would like totally be a gym bro, bro.

It has been a while since I've read Republic, but I remember Book 8 differently. To quote the IEP,

   Tyranny arises out of democracy when the desire for freedom to do what one wants becomes extreme (562b-c).  The freedom or license aimed at in the democracy becomes so extreme that any limitations on anyone’s freedom seem unfair.  Socrates points out that when freedom is taken to such an extreme it produces its opposite, slavery (563e-564a).  The tyrant comes about by presenting himself as a champion of the people against the class of the few people who are wealthy (565d-566a).  The tyrant is forced to commit a number of acts to gain and retain power: accuse people falsely, attack his kinsmen, bring people to trial under false pretenses, kill many people, exile many people, and purport to cancel the debts of the poor to gain their support (565e-566a).  The tyrant eliminates the rich, brave, and wise people in the city since he perceives them as threats to his power (567c).  Socrates indicates that the tyrant faces the dilemma to either live with worthless people or with good people who may eventually depose him and chooses to live with worthless people (567d).  The tyrant ends up using mercenaries as his guards since he cannot trust any of the citizens (567d-e).  The tyrant also needs a very large army and will spend the city’s money (568d-e), and will not hesitate to kill members of his own family if they resist his ways (569b-c).

This summary matches my recollection more closely than yours. Could you please quote primary sources on what exactly you mean by "Plato's description of social decline?"

All of the exotic acting talent in the world won't save an industry that's forgotten the very basics of how to make a good movie.

>These people shape the culture that the young people around you consume. They create the memes of six-seven-ification.

I'd disagree, six-seven-ification is caused by the human desire for clout and tribal motivations - I'd argue that social currency is the reason people pursue fiat currency; ask yourself this, if I have you $100 billion, but you could not interact with any human beings from then on, would that $100 billion still matter?

Rather than influencers forcing memes, "six-seven-ification" arises organically from the authors' pursuing of belonging/clout within a tribe. What I would say is more interesting is that the lifetime of such cultural outputs is becoming more and more fleeting.

For Millenials & gen X our memes seemed to have quite a bit of permanence over the years. For the boomers and silent generations before us, their cultures were even more static (and traditional) by comparison. For gen z/a it seems their cultural language changes month to month, sometimes week to week.

Memes aren't enjoyed for years now, they're enjoyed for a few months. Horizontally spinning rat, Coffin dance, etc are all ancient history now.

And you can see the reaction to this; there are spikes in search interest on a lot of classic (2005-2015) memes, Gen Z is desperately embracing retro tech like camcorders, polaroids and 90s/00s outfits in a snap back to reality. The gravity of this cannot be understated.

Mom's spaghetti.