Levelsio and I go way back, like 8 years back. I first met him on the twitter when I came across the “indie hacker” scene. As a long time social media lurker he stroke me as an influencer first and foremost, and so I moved on. Fast forward 8 years and I find myself on X again and look who it is my good friend Levelsio.
Yup, he is still there doing his thing, cool, mute, move on.
Lex Fridmen seems to be something of a god to a certain bubble of the tech bro crowd. Levelsio showing up on there is seen as a kind of further validation of his pseudo authority on “tech” subjects. Now everybody is sharing their opinions on levelyboi.
Now, all the other tech influencers are playing their 9D chess engagement farming the hell out of the drama. So I find myself uninstalling X until this blows over but while that happens I better get in on the action as I know people are waiting on bated breath for my opinion. Buckle up.
I have no idea what happened on the podcast because I don't care about the guests opinions. You see, levelsy, is an influencer. He doesn't care about technology let alone the tiny sliver of technology I care about. He learned barely enough jquery and php to slap together products people would buy on the internet. He is a hustler first and foremost not an engineer, programmer, etc. He did not give a shit about "AI" until he found a way to sell a 12 word prompt to people.
That is ok. I would sell a 12 word prompt to people if I knew how. But I don't. He does. Heck, I'd sell a 14 word prompt to people but idk if going up or down on word counts is better. Maybe a 4 word prompt?
Influencers are annoying.
Like really annoying.
They are those super loud people that keep showing up to your favorite workcafe. You try going at a different time maybe a few hours earlier and at first it works they are not there but sure as shit the third time you go there they are again. Like goddamn why are they always there? How can they spend so much time at this cafe it is only open 10 hours a day. Its almost like they live there...
I don't care about witty clapbacks, being based, MMR, or whatever else it is people are screaming about. I would mute them but there are 1500 🦆 around them repeating their every word between 0 to 10 times in a cacophony of squawking noise.
It is something awful to be around.
Logan Paul and co used their massive influencer network to market a sports drink to the tune of billions in sales. It is now everyone in the US. All the stores. All the places. That is impressive. It is inarguable. I cannot help but to respect the hustle. Those people worked hard to get the result. Decades building up their personal brands and then collabing on something so big.
I have no respect for the product. It is terrible. Everyone agrees. They agree. It is almost more impressive because the product is so bad. It shows that the numbers are 100% because of the influcencer network and not because of the product. The value creation in the capitalistic exchange when purchasing a Prime drink is almost 100% the feeling people get knowing they purchased a product from the Logal Paul club. Hilarious, I bet he could sell bathwater oh wait someone already has.
This is why we don't like influencers. Because deep down we all know they suck and they know it. They just don't care and we wish we could not care like them.
Levelsio is an influencer.
His products look like some kid just learned jquery and php and started slapping together ideas until something stuck because that is exactly what happened. I know this because that is what Levelsio told me on Twitter 8 years ago. His words not mine. Good for him. People buy his products. People buy Prime Energy too. People also buy goop. I don't buy those products. Move on.
But I can't. I can't move on. People won't let me.
They. Are. Everywhere. Followers. Somewhere someone is an Elon stan or some shit and cannot help but to repost everything that has Elon's face on it. You block them but there are at least 40,000 others just like them. What sucks is that maybe you don't actually want to block them just their Elon crap. All these AI startups and there is still no LLM tool where I can be like, “hide posts that are about elon musk” and it works. smh
This is how it works. Something happens. The first layer of influencer take their tweets and post their takes. Ok, they are muted. We all good. Then their sycophants retweet those same takes but only 50% are muted. Fine annoyed but I am still ok. Then the influencers clapback at each others takes which those same sycophants repost again with comments, likes, and bells. Some 1% of the normal people get triggered enough to engage which often spins it up all over again.
I don't care about levelsio, the Kardashians, or Mr.Beast drama. At all. I don't think they care about me either. We all like it that way. The followers just can't let that happen. They cannot let us live in harmony.
The social media lurker has an amazing defense mechanism in the event it becomes annoyed by an influencers reach. It simply deletes the infected app and hides back under a rock for a year or two until the influencer is irrelevant once again.