The only 'influencer' I follow

Technically, I follow 2 influencers (both local to where I'm from weirdly enough) but one of them doesn't do much "influencing" (cooking tiktoks lmao) anymore, and she's busy with her big girl job. The second one, I started following 2-ish years ago when she had maybe a handful of followers. When she initially started creating content on tiktok it was humorous in nature, themed around graphic design. She'd take pictures herself, or take submissions of hilariously bad graphic design in the balkans and talk about it. This is generally more in line with the type of content I consoom on tiktok, I tend to not do the "following someone purely because of their personality" thing.

After she gained some traction, her channel became less centered around a skill (graphic design) and more centered on her. She'd give her hot takes, insight into her life philosophies, her job, her interests, and she began to take some partnerships here or there which is what I would at this point refer to as her becoming an influencer. She really exploded in popularity, and is now the "weird and brutally honest and authentic" local influencer, a niche I don't think anyone in this whole area ever populated. Now she's appearing in our magazines, being interviewed, appearing in conferences and podcasts. I developed a certain fascination with her because of how despite her being terminally online, she occupies completely different areas of the Internet with some interesting overlaps.

In some aspects I heavily relate to her, she's kind of a strange looking woman (imagine: female Adam Driver) that's very comfortable in her skin, and the way we both navigate through some issues is pretty similar too. I'd also say she's really good at introspection and laying those thoughts out to the public, which is what made me stay despite not liking this genre of content. On the other hand, I don't agree with a lot of her takes she decides to put out, such as the classique brainlet libfem perspective of "bonnie blue is based actually, tradwives are the real prostitutes!" which, why not both? I'll give her props for standing her ground on a lot of feminist issues that my country is really behind on in anno domini 2025. The amount of hate she receives for not shaving her armpits is astounding, which is funny when you consider the fact that our grandmas and great grandmas didn't shave but ok. I'm also not a fan of her believing in random woo woo concepts and taking a lot of things at face value and I believe this might be something that'll land her into a controversy eventually lmao.

What prompted me to write this whole thing was a podcast she was on yesterday. I believe it's her first time appearing on a podcast, and it's the podcasts first episode. The podcast is led by our scout troop (hilariously cute honestly) and even the interview location is in the nature. The general theme of their podcast is to talk about digital habits, going unplugged etc. so it's very interesting that as their first guest they chose her, someone who is openly terminally online and doesn't shy away from speaking about how addicted she is to being online, along with it becoming her job.

I think she made some good points, and gave some sound advice, especially towards people that are desperate to become influencers (lol....), but a lot of it can be applied to general online interactions too such as dealing with negative comments in any form, parasocial relationships and so on. The thing that endlessly keeps piquing my interest though is just how different our online areas of interest are and therefore our experiences are also so much different yet we still might have some converging opinions despite her internet home bases being very "normie" from my point of view. For example there's a section in the podcast where they started up the theme of niche (hello new buzzword) communities and she said "regarding niche groups on reddit or like in the past sites like 4chan, which - nobody uses anymore". And you know what, even though her comment about 4chan might have come from a place of total ignorance, she's kind of right. 4chan became a normie and bot central that lost its memetic and mythical influence as a le scary place for hackers even on sites like instagram and tiktok but contradictory to that I feel like it's more common in the mainstream than ever before, to the point that Lily Allen named a song on her new album "4chan Stan", which, cringe, but it really paints you a picture of how far the mighty have fallen. There's just such a difference between being a hacker known as 4chan to being used as a synonym for.. incel? cheater???? Honestly, don't know where Lily was going with that horrible reference. Neither describe the site well, yet both are indications for what the public perceives the site as at a certain point in time.

WHERE WAS I GOING WITH THIS HONESTLY... Anyway, she might be a libfemmy modern consoomer of basic alt trends but she does manage to come across as pretty authentic and confident and I think it'll bring her a very lucrative future. She has a good work ethic and she's very creative which will get her far imo. It's rare for me to be invested in an influencer at all, but I think it's the geographical and cultural vicinity that draws me to her and wants to see how her career develops lmao.