Everyone wants to be an influencer

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• Advertisers don’t want to use the same influencer again and again.
• 50M consider themselves online creators.
• Short-shelf-life consumer goods businesses have seen a negative hit to their brand as a result of influencer association.

Hacker News

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• The distaste for the term ‘influencer’ arises because the job description is basically ‘gain a social media following and then influence that following to buy products, adopt political views, or do other things that your actual clients want you to do.’
  • In this scenario, the product being sold is access to that following, and the influencer will - like Facebook - sell that product to anyone for any purpose. It’s a bit creepy because the influencer can care not at all about the following, happily pushing crappy supplements or other junk with no qualms.
• In contrast, consider the term ‘creator’ which we think of as someone producing artistic or engineering etc. value, sharing that with the world, and perhaps selling their work online, with limited (and curated) need for the junk advertising / opinion manipulation / political shenanigans cash flows.
• Are ‘influencers’ that much different from ‘celebrities’? Some are famous purely for their looks, some for their talent, some for both, occasionally some for their lack of both. For me, it feels like we’ve always had influencers.
• Nobody likes to think that they’re engaged with influencers or capable of being influenced. It’s viewed as a negative trait, so we only project it on others and make up excuses as to why our influencers aren’t actually influencers.
• The barrier to entry of being ‘known’ is so low now, that the old-school notion of fame doesn’t apply anymore. Hence Everyone in the title. Buy the latest iPhone, setup a few accounts and then you can start selling stuff really easily. You’re also selling your personality too though, not just some product. The best influencers have insane charisma.
• Surprisingly, people follow attractive people because they want to see photos of attractive people and not because they wonder what tea they drink.
• Yes. My GF and I have both purchased items that an influencer is ‘marketing’. It’s not so much that I’ve been deceived, it’s more about the exposure. Some items I’m interested in and the influencer simply put it on my radar.
• The mega scale influencers like the Kardashian family definitely influence, and have created billion-dollar brands like Kylie Cosmetics. The regular level influencers are complete nonentities. I remember a story here a while back where an “influencer” with 2 million “followers” couldn’t sell 36 T-shirts.

Laying the Frontend Foundations with a Platform Team

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• Front-end of front-end: UI, CSS, components, etc.
• Data of front-end: Client data store, state management, data transformation, interacting with data sources, APIs, etc.
• Backbone of front-end: Setting up tools for building/deploying.
• Problems the engineers were dealing with:
  • Only 4 engineers need to think about the front-end build tooling, not 100.
  • Only 2 engineers need to think about tooltip component, not 50.
  • Lack of infra standardization.
  • Lack of design consistency.
  • Complicated release management.
  • Lack of testing framework.
  • Local environment setup.
• Nirvana workflow:
  • Scaffold project.
  • One command to run project.
  • Use design system components.
  • Setup tests.
  • Performance tests.
  • PR deployment preview.
  • Build/deployment setup.
  • Performance/error monitoring.
• Core infrastructure
  • Providing a set of modules with sensible defaults and interfaces to extend or enhance them.
  • CLI scaffolding.
  • CI/CD setup.
  • Linting using ESLint. Typescript setup. A/B testing SDK. User event analytics SDK. Automate PR chores. Monorepo support.

Comprehensive Guide to Higher-Order RxJs Mapping Operators: switchMap, mergeMap, concatMap (and exhaustMap)

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