One of the most absurd concepts to me in human nature is the idea of social proof. I’m sure you already know what that means, but I’ll explain it just to be specific here: I’m talking about the idea of a person seeing another person, under the filter of knowledge that the person they are looking at has been approved or liked in some way by someone else.
The most obvious example of this in our current culture is probably the way the idea has been used by marketing companies. Customer reviews are a really important part of the business for companies like Amazon, for instance. When someone sees that a product has been previously rated well by many people, that encourages them to make the purchase. This serves a useful purpose: I’m not knocking social proof entirely. It has its place.
Customer reviews are one thing, but you can also see this on social media, with people paying strong attention to follower counts, etc. (That’s one of the reasons it’s always hilarious when we see some poor sap in the news that has been catfished by a clearly obvious Russian bot: how could he have not seen the signs that this person he was talking to for months wasn’t real? Haha). It’s probably not nice to think about too much, but it is a crucial aspect of how humans relate to one another: the more people that seem to like you, the better it is for you overall. The more of a social life you seem to have, the more important you look because people are apes and think: that person is safe and potentially fun to be around because lots of people are around them. It works this way across the board: if an employer thinks you’re in demand and might get hired somewhere else, they might consider being competitive with their salary, etc.
Where I think social proof gets weird is the initial area where someone or something has absolutely zero social proof. Let’s say, for example: a fat, balding cross-eyed guy with bad acne and glasses who runs a landscaping business. He might have like 2 or 3 followers initially, but he is trying to use social media to branch out and get the word out about his amazing abilities to trim hedges or whatever.
Initially, this guy is not going to have many followers besides family and friends. It’s kind of sad, but it’s a hard fact of life: the scale is not in this dude’s favour. Especially if he’s using a visual platform like Instagram: pretty much nobody wants to see some ugly guy standing next to a neatly trimmed lawn and smiling with thumbs up. The support he gets at first will all be pity likes.
The thing I find interesting about this is, if we were to fast forward about a year or two later, when this same guy has maybe 100 or so more followers, we might view him differently. But ultimately, what has seriously changed about this person? He might be better at his job after a year more of experience, but he’s still essentially the same guy offering the same services. Hypothetically, let’s say this guy started off with 0 followers, and ended up with 569 followers: if he were to reach out to you about his lawn services, you would not trust him at 0 followers, but you might trust him at 569. This is so absurd to me, because his follower count might have a successful trajectory, a snowball effect that has absolutely nothing to do with his talent or his business.
This phenomenon is something I like to think about as “The Gap,” which is pretty much meaningless. There seems to be a vast difference in people when we look at the tangible metric of “social proof” between two people, but there is not always a real discernible difference in quality. So an important distinction to make when judging two people (artists, businesspeople, or whoever) is to be aware of “The Gap.” Recognize that you are judging someone based on that gap, and may even be doing so unfairly.
An example of finding gold where you might not expect it: the YouTube algorithm. Most people tend to zone out and allow the platform to bring videos they might enjoy to them. But a little-known trick you can do is to toy with the settings on how videos are displayed: if you look for the videos with under a certain amount of views you might be surprised. There are tons of people out there making videos that have less than 500 views. Admittedly, there is a lot of nonsense made by insane people out there. But then you’ll find there are also hilarious people that nobody knows about yet, or ever will. It’s been one of my favourite phenomenons on the internet in the last 10 years or so.
You can also see this on platforms like Twitter, where a popular user with a certain high amount of followers will get a consistent amount of likes and retweets. This type of person usually appears in your feed whether you like them or not: they’re just popular and that’s how the system works. But as with YouTube: if you find the accounts that have less than 1000 followers, you might find yourself pleasantly surprised. To me, the funniest and most interesting people out there are the folks nobody knows about. Some of the funniest things I’ve encountered on Twitter have been posted by people with under 200 followers.
There’s a reason for this, and it’s something nobody talks about: the more people that like you, the less you are allowed to say. Someone that has over 10,000 followers, for example, is always risking a loss for their brand by saying the wrong thing. But someone with little to no social proof in place never really has to worry about acting in corporate interests because they’re usually a single entity. The more popular something or someone is, the more suspect and less trustworthy they become to me.
That’s why I think social proof is a somewhat invalid thing we need to be more cognizant of. You might think you’re experiencing the best of whatever it is you’re doing, but if you put in even a modicum of effort into finding stuff you’ll be exposed to a whole other world. It’s like that in every single field: film, music, art, business, etc etc, whatever. Popular shit sucks. The people nobody knows are the best: that’s where the truth and authenticity is.