Influencer ethics

dfk41 Crickey, where do I start? If a newbie came on here, as often happens for advice for their first machine, and the collective opinion on here was go watch Lance or any of the commercial interest based influencers, then the forum would soon die. We have a wealth of knowledge on here amongst some very experienced people. @DavecUK has a YouTube channel. It is not monetised which means no one can stop him from saying what he wants. The YT influencer lives in a little world where the sun, constantly revolves on its axis in its orbit around the earth…….they dare not say negative things or the orbit will soon dry up. You learn more from the people by what they do not say than from what they do.

If a coffee manufacturer brings a new machine to the market, how do they get the message across? Do they advertise on radio or tv? No, they contact people on YT, give them a machine and a nod and a wink later it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

If that is the world in which you want to live, then god help the rest of us!

Right on cue 🙄

whinmoor85 I mean it’s just constant, if a YouTuber gets mentioned you’ll instantly see accusations of ’they’re only in it for the money’, ’you can’t trust what they say’, ’they’re just QVC salesman’ - give it a rest! 😂

whinmoor85 It really comes across as just old men upset that ‘influencers’ have a lot more influence than they do because forums are a relic of the old internet and the much larger social media apps are full of young people that don’t care about the gatekeepers on places like here.

Or, you could bear in mind that some folk on forums have been making & studying coffee making since before the latest crop of YT influencers. So when they say something that is known to be wrong, or don’t attribute proper credits, we can point it out here, rather then be ignored in the unfathomable ocean of comments on their YT channel.

If you come on here and say you have invented the wheel, you’ll get some push back, On YT you can delete, or switch off comments, or wait for them to drop off the bottom of the page.

When people mislead you, whether by accident, or intent, would you not rather be aware? (If not, there is the ‘ignore’ button.)

I personally don’t see any evidence that people who have discovered James Hoffmann’s coffee content are particularly young, the people who have mentioned it to me, unprompted, are my sort of age (not young).

There’s plenty of useful info that influencer’s could be putting out - and some do…there’s no backlash from old men, because there is nothing to criticise.

Ask yourself, other than which of the latest bits & bobs that are being released, that you might want to buy, what have you really learned from the YT influencers? (I have learned not to plunge French presses and that preheating my drip cone can intensify the flavour…great stuff to know (thanks to Mr Hoffmann), but it’s not a lot to show for how many weekly videos from a dozen or so folk, over 5 years is it?).

dfk41 yeah but I’m clueless 🤣🤣

I cant’ like the way some “influencers” does realize their contents, but no one pointed me a gun to believe their opinions.

I can eventually advice others about a non correct information, but the final decision is not mine.

Good for us there are forum like here where passionate or newbie can share their opinions.

Cuprajake Yep spot on as I can’t begin to count how often I see people living in front of a screen… they just have to be involved with YT, TT, FB, IG, etc. every hour of every day. They just have to check in, tag someone, walk across busy streets looking down and so on. Take away that and the majority of the population would be lost and dumbed down instantly. Take away the financial compensation from sites and things would really scramble.

tompoland Well, there are plenty of valid points made for/mostly against influencers, bwahaha… Sure, threads drift a bit off topic often, but makes for interesting reading at times. Problem with H-B is they tend to get butthurt if you go against their ‘logic’ and rarely see there’s more than 1 side to the discussion.

@tompoland not at all its great discussion and will show you what you will be in for,

every time i post a vid of a simple extraction i get a youtube expert telling me what i did wrong, its going to come with the territory im afraid,

what i would plead with you is to be a breath of fresh air and use measuring tool and give real world evidence not just opinion, as taste is way too subjective, but if you can give refractometer and kurve sift grind numbers etc, it would be soooooo amazing.

tompoland Come on Tom……this is a great discussion. Not many forums allow things to flow like this forum. Sure it creeps off topic a little but so what matey? You never know what you either might learn, or be able to pass on your own info by remaining in the discussion.

tompoland
They certainly make my coffee hobby more colourful, it would be very dull without them.
IMO we are all adults, you can only be influenced if you allow yourself to be, they are not grooming the vulnerable here.
Not all content is about encouraging people to part with money.

Speaking as an old fossil myself, I appreciate the role that influencers and other voices play in the marketplace. I’m glad that I can hear about things other than through the traditional gatekeepers of information and marketing. Yes, there is something distasteful about the facade of impartiality that is really just lower rent advertising, but, at its worst, it’s really no different than the days of glossy and wholly beholden magazine reviews that just so happened to feature flattering reviews of their advertisers. My industry heavily relies on reviews and ratings. I get daily solicitations for various types of purchased reviews. One industry magazine even gives me a list of prices to appear on the cover, to be interviewed, to have a favorable blurb, yearly awards, etc…

There is simply a lower threshold for others to jump into the reviewing game now. Some will be terrible, some will be new versions of the same old marketing crap. Others will be interesting and relatively independent sources. It’s still buyer beware, we just have a lot more dreck to sift through on the way to finding useful information. It means relatively small players with a good product can get good buzz. And it means a lot of gullible people will believe stupid promises across every subject.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. It’s just that we old folks will disapprove of how the next generation will make an easier buck doing it differently than us.

In times gone by, experts earned their laurels through training and experience. Sadly, the downside of the Internet age is that we are all experts now - all we have do is upload a few videos and Bob’s your uncle.

Systemic Much the same was said after the introduction of the printing press in the fifteenth century. :-) Publishing across all media continues to become increasingly more accessible, some might call it democratised. With that you get the good and the bad - with printing it led to the moral horror of nineteenth century penny dreadfuls. With the internet we get the moral horror of hipsters making little videos of them talking about things they barely understand. On balance though, the good outweighs the bad.

The increasing amount of information available demands that information consumers develop a new skillset - that’s the ability to sort the wheat from the chaff. Once you are able to do that, the wise thing is to ignore the chaff. That means inter alia, identifying the YT channels that you think are full of BS and ignoring them.

If others haven’t developed this skillset and are watching stuff you disapprove of, and being misinformed that’s their problem - not anyone else’s. There are some on here that seem to think that they have the right to police others’ viewing habits. It’s all a bit Mary Whitehouse and prescriptive.

Gagaryn the wise thing is to ignore the chaff.

The trouble is, most people cannot……thinking it to be nothing more than harmless entertainment

Gagaryn The increasing amount of information available demands that information consumers develop a new skillset - that’s the ability to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Agree but not sure I see that happening. I think there is a problem with shortening attention spans requiring the subject matter in question to be reduced to easily digestible bites.