

How to become Internet famous for $68 - coldtea
http://qz.com/74937/how-to-become-internet-famous-without-ever-existing

======
Irregardless
"Internet famous" still involves actual humans being aware of your existence.
This guy just bought some Twitter followers, posted a fake Wikipedia article,
and then arbitrarily declared his alter ego internet famous. Color me
unimpressed.

He could have at least tried to _do something_ with this alter ego to test if
his manufactured "fame" could withstand the slightest bit of human scrutiny.
Instead, all he proved is that websites like Kred use faulty algorithms to
measure social media influence.

At least we learned one thing, though: Kred is preying on giant companies like
Procter & Gamble and Budweiser that still can't grasp the concept of social
media.

~~~
hayksaakian
I think that was his point. By "Internet Famous" he is not actually famous to
the greater internet, but convincingly appears so.

Obviously if put to the test, the crack experts on the internet could see
through his BS via Google, but the people you would try to leverage being
internet famous with tend not to be internet savvy -- hence his point about
the large multinational companies getting suckered into kred.

~~~
Irregardless
> By "Internet Famous" he is not actually famous to the greater internet

So he's internet famous but not internet famous?

> . . .but convincingly appears so. Obviously if put to the test, the crack
> experts on the internet could see through his BS via Google

And it's convincing but not convincing?

I think you're being extremely generous by saying it would take an "expert" to
see through his paper-thin facade.

------
lukaszlindell
I don't see the big thing in this. The title of the article is "How to become
internet famous for $68" but I can't seem to understand in what way Santiago
Swallow is to be considered famous. Kevin Ashton writes that he bought 90k
followers. According to the screen shot, it seems like he lost almost 5 000 of
those, not a good turn out. As the article also states:

"Santiago Swallow may be one of the most famous people no one has heard of."

Fame is based on how many people knows you. If no one knows your name, your
not famous. If the Santiago setup doesn't generate new followers on Twitter,
the tactic isn't very successful.

From my point of view, Santiago Swallow is (was) a very static Twitter account
that haven't come to life.

To call a thing like this successful, there has to be other, external forces
giving life into the persona. From what I can see, everything about Santiago
comes from the creator, not from anyone else.

------
mbesto
This reminds me of Lorenzeo Von Matterhorn:
<http://www.lorenzovonmatterhorn.com/>

The premise of the article is thought-provoking, but slightly invalid. A few
things:

\- Like all fakes, they eventually get caught.

\- Maintaining fame is a lifelong journey.

\- As places like twitter get more and more saturated the less likely
"10,000+" followers will matter.

\- You only have one thing in this world, your reputation. If you screw it up
by buying fake followers, you have 10 times more of the work you require to
naturally build reputation in order to climb out of the hole you've put
yourself in.

What would be REALLY interesting is to see what kind of money Santiago Swallow
generated from his "internet fame".

~~~
coldtea
> _Like all fakes, they eventually get caught._

From a logically consistent point of view, how can you even prove that? Nobody
except those "in the game" would be able to know about fakes that didn't get
caught ever. So it's a bias fallacy: you only ever get to hear about fakes
that GET caught.

Second, even if we are to believe that all "eventually get caught" what does
it matter? If the "eventually" is 2-10 years, that's enough time to do a lot
of damage, fool people, etc. It's as if saying "Crime is no biggie, because
eventually all criminals get dead".

> _\- Maintaining fame is a lifelong journey._

If you want to maintain it for a lifetime, yes. If you only want some time in
the spotlight, no. Why would a troll or con-artist care to maintain "lifelong
fame"? He wants to get something out of the fake identity, it's not like it's
his real life.

> _\- You only have one thing in this world, your reputation. If you screw it
> up by buying fake followers, you have 10 times more of the work you require
> to naturally build reputation in order to climb out of the hole you've put
> yourself in._

Doesn't matter for people that bought the fake followers and didn't get
caught. Or whatever similar fake-generation system they used in another
medium.

~~~
mbesto
> _how can you even prove that?_

Fair point, but I suspect the only way this discussion ends in an
philosophical debate about perception vs reality.

My overall point is what is end-goal objective for someone who would implement
such a technique? To make money? The author is suggesting that it's easier and
cheaper building your personal brand (and thus reap benefits) than to work
hard organically. Furthermore that we should be concerned that it is possible.
My perspective is "So what? These people are running very risky lives and will
get caught. Even if they don't, they still live carrying a massive burden of
risk". Social network have equally positive and negative powers associated
with them.

------
salman89
I wish Wikipedia would score their pages based on # of contributors and their
past contribution histories, and flag the page at the top for the user if the
score is too low. I tend to trust Wikipedia as a legitimate source, but if it
can be gamed so easily that trust will quickly be lost.

~~~
eli
Seems like such a system would just make it more exciting to game.

------
MysticFear
The cached version of the twitter account that was suspended within this
article:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FSantiagoSwallow&aq=f&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FSantiagoSwallow)

------
bridgeyman
My theory is that the only reason businesses think Twitter is big is because
of the large number of fake people. Of people that I personally know, only
about a dozen are active Twitter users.

~~~
tomasien
I don't know how old you are or your profession, but as a 24 year old in the
creative community, literally every single person I know is an active Twitter
user, and many have replaced it with texting. I live in Richmond, VA so not
exactly a tech hub.

~~~
jerrya
_... literally every single person I know is an active Twitter user,_

and

 _many have replaced it with texting._

Non sequitur. Your facts are uncoordinated.

~~~
dbaupp
I think they are saying that many people they knows use Twitter rather than
text, which isn't particularly uncoordinated nor is it a non-sequitur.

~~~
salvadors
They may be _trying_ to say that, but they actually said the opposite.

------
wyclif
Gaaah, I hate Quartz's site design.

~~~
brownbat
All I get is "Your browser doesn't support Javascript..." :)

Really wish people didn't require that to let me read some text.

~~~
coldtea
They don't want to let you see some text.

They also want to show you their ads (which are JS based) and put some bread
on their tables.

They could make them plain images or text, but why bother (and work extra) for
the insignificant number of JS-disabling people? Not to mention that those
same people are likely to block ads anyway...

So, no JS, no service.

~~~
retube
but doesn't this impact SEO having JS-only content? Or is dynamic content now
fully rendered by serach engines?

~~~
coldtea
Google has some guidelines to be able to search dynamic (js) content too.
Plus, the bot (which is some headlines webkit, I've read) also runs javascript
before it reads the page.

Now, that's for Google, but anyway, ATM, I think, Google is the only search
engine that matters.

------
Paul_D_Santana
The link doesn't seem to go through to the article. Here's a direct link if
the one above didn't work for you either:

[http://qz.com/74937/how-to-become-internet-famous-without-
ev...](http://qz.com/74937/how-to-become-internet-famous-without-ever-
existing/#74937/how-to-become-internet-famous-without-ever-existing/)

------
jerich
I don't know about his other claims, but this one seemed a little suspicious:
"Next I gave him a face by mashing up three portraits from Google images using
a free trial copy of Adobe’s “Lightroom” image manipulation software."

As a user of Lightroom since version 1 in 2007, and spending many hundreds of
hours using it as my main image-editing program on 40,000+ images since then,
it would be my last choice of imaging software to "mash[] up three portraits"

I'm not sure if it's even possible to combine multiple images in Lightroom;
it's more for making global adjustments to single images. There might be a way
to do it using a third-party plugin, but most Lightroom functions work on the
whole image (adjusting exposure, white balance, etc). There are some cloning
and healing tools, but as far as I know, there's no way to clone a nose out of
one portrait and paste it into another.

Even if it's possible, it's not something that a first-time user would be able
to do in the author's two hour window on April 14th after downloading the free
trial, especially given all his other activities.

Maybe the author is just trying to CYA for using someone's picture he found
online, but if that part is clearly exaggerated, maybe he's just trying to
become "internet famous" by making up a made-up "internet famous" alter-ego,
or something more meta- like that.

------
danso
A lot of this boils down to: it's hard to follow links.

Someone's massive Twitter following is simply a large list of links to follow
up on...and determining their fakeness is algorithmically but who has the time
to check each follower's activity level? Most social media "professionals" I
know have no clue except to trust a paid-for black box analysis service.

And many well-accepted Wikipedia articles have plenty of dead links in their
footnotes, even though such cruft should be easy to red flag. What's harder to
diagnose are footnotes that refer to information in print. If I told you that,
among my accomplishments, the story of how I built my fortune is referred to
on pages 106-118 of one of Malcolm Gladwell's early, more obscure titles...how
many Wikipedia editors would bother to look that up? Or maybe I just make up a
book and enter in a random ISBN.

It's still all-to-easy to avoid examination by promising that the original
source of the info is just one click away. As long as you don't inspire anyone
to vet you out of jealousy or spite, you could go undetected for a long while,
despite the power of the hyperlink

~~~
Wingman4l7
FWIW, there is at least one bot on Wikipedia that crawls for dead reference
links and marks them as such.

~~~
eridius
How often does it crawl? Just this week I tried to look up a reference on a
page and found it dead, probably for quite some time (I forget the page I was
on).

~~~
Wingman4l7
Well it turns out I may have been mistaken; the bot that I thought did that is
defunct, and I cannot easily find another that does that. After thinking about
it, I can see some reasons why you might not want a bot automatically marking
links as dead. There are these, which I think are a bit more manual in nature:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Link_rot#Bots>

~~~
emiliobumachar
Please share those reasons. The only one I can think of is false positives of
temporarily down servers, which could be mitigated by timed retries.

~~~
Wingman4l7
That is the main reason. Another would be some sort of "Content not here
anymore" message that doesn't conform to HTTP status code standards, giving a
false negative.

------
aantix
What companies have solved the Twitter reputation problem reliably?

Certainly this is just a matter of looking at the followers, seeing how old
those accounts are, how long they've been tweeting, and coming up with some
sort of normalized score?

I understand there's a ton crawling, but certainly doable. Or am I overlooking
something?

~~~
msvan
I guess what you're overlooking is that there is little financial incentive to
do this. No one makes money revealing fake identities; the money is in making
them.

~~~
corin_
If there's enough financial incentive for services like Klout
(<http://klout.com/home>) then presumably there are two subsets of the people
targeted, one who want fake followers to be counted, one who would love to be
able to show "I'm legit!"

------
ddonnelly
His Klout score was only 23...

------
Hitchhiker
" There is, unfortunately, only one product that can maintain its value as
everything else is devalued under the banner of the noosphere. At the end of
the rainbow of open culture lies an eternal spring of advertisements. " -
Lanier, Jaron (2010-01-18). You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. Penguin. Kindle
Edition.

------
FPSDavid
More like how to get a troll Twitter account suspended after you get too giddy
and write an article about it.

~~~
coldtea
Yes, more like that.

I mean if you ignore the other 99% of TFA.

------
dirkk0
Now someone could to step up and form a band called 'Santiago Swallow'
following this micro-hype.

------
nodata
Please: do not hide the scroll bar.

------
ameen
I wonder how many "Twitter users" are indeed fakes, bots and duplicates. I
think Google+'s requirement for real-names would've been prompted as a result
of such tactics.

------
donebizkit
A good insight on tools and services in the Twitter ecosystem.

------
ereckers
The site's a nice WordPress implementation.

~~~
nwh
The site doesn't load if you block Google Analytics. There's nothing nice
about it.

~~~
__david__
Hmmm, it loaded for me (and looked great) and I use noscript to block
everything.

~~~
nwh
Ghostery keeps scripting on, but nukes outgoing tracking like GA. The site
waits for the pingback from GA, which is never coming.

------
ivanist
There are just too many pseudo-intellectuals in this planet. This guy Scott
Steinberg was mentioned and so I went to his website to see that whether he is
really a 'stay ahead of the curve' kind of guy. There is a video in his front
page:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=C...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ChRyLw2uUlc)
and after reading the first comment I realized that it is indeed a fake video
with no audience. There was pretty much no content in the video too.

And I see so many people claiming themselves to be futurists, leaders blah
blah..

~~~
bruceb
Yeah I almost felt bad for the guy as the video was clearly something he paid
to make. But I guess as he is "Thrilled to be giving keynote speech at Arizona
Board of Nursing's 2014 CNA Educators Retreat!" Someone seems to think it is
worth paying him to say basic stuff.

I guess fake it 'till you (sorta) make it is not dead.

~~~
bruceb
Looks like he lost about 5,000 followers in a day.

I think he had like 24k and now he has 19k.

