Marketers Are like a Locust Plague

Blogging used to be a hobby. You wrote about your life, your interests, whatever. Then marketers found out that blogs could drive attention. So every company started a blog. Then came SEO to bring more traffic. Then analytics to figure out how to bring even more traffic. Then some people started charging for blog posts. “Content marketing”. Now nobody can tell the genuine posts from the marketing ones. Marketers killed blogging.

Twitter used to be a place where you shared your status update with anyone in the world. Then marketers found out that tweeting could bring attention. So they joined and started tweeting about the things they wanted to promote. Then they kept optimizing their tweets. #buildinpublic. Bragging about MRR. Posting vague nonsense disguised as wisdom. Stealing jokes. Now Twitter is a shadow of its former self. Marketers killed Twitter.

Product Hunt used to be like Show HN¹ turned into a website. People building things and showing them because they wanted to. Then marketers came, and it became a place where people prepared for weeks for their launch day, sending reminders for friends to vote, trying to game their way to the top. It became a place where people wanted to sell you something, not share what they built. Marketers killed Product Hunt.

This is how it always goes:

1. A new platform appears.
2. Marketers notice the platform.
3. More marketers join. Regular users start complaining.
4. There are more marketers than regular users.
5. Platform becomes marketer-only. No real content. Might as well be dead.

LinkedIn is at stage 4. Product Hunt is at stage 5.

The thing is, on every modern social media platform, all the content you see is marketing content. It’s either by existing marketers, or by future marketers who will use their accounts for marketing once they’ve reached enough followers.

(I’m sure there will be marketers who read this and think “Why complain? Marketing is always hard” or “Lazy engineer doesn’t want to put effort into marketing"… Locusts.)