The weeklong TikTok fight over whether NYC influencers are ‘boring’

TikTok’s curse or blessing, depending on how you look at it, is that any video made by any random person can get millions of views without much rhyme or reason. Thousands of comments flood in, people make reaction videos, your random thoughts are referenced as gospel, and the TikTok content machine starts to whir.

If you’re of a certain demographic with certain interests — namely lifestyle, beauty, fashion, and New York City — you’ve probably already seen this viral 43-second clip that has spiraled into a full-blown Discourse Cycle. Earlier this month, a TikTok user, who had 90 followers at the time, posted a video that cut right to the chase: “All right guys, I’m just going to say it: I hate all of the New York influencers. I think they’re boring as fuck, and I think they’re all carbon copies of one another,” the creator, @martinifeeny, says. The biggest influencers based in New York wear and buy the same things, she goes on to say, and they’re all thin and pretty but boring.

In the comments, people called out the specific boutique fitness classes and skincare routines that appear to form the lion’s share of the influencers’ hobbies; some made the point that following a more diverse set of influencers would solve the problem entirely. Some influencers — apparently feeling personally attacked — made (and deleted) videos responding to the original one.

You do not need to know the specific influencers enmeshed in the discussion (though Vulture has a good run down), live in New York, or even follow influencers to get the point. Social media is awash in people who look, sound, and act like their peers, often for money. This “drama” is narrowly focused on one type of person, but it is a microcosm of the internet writ large: the most visible content online is just a slightly different version of something else.

In November, I wrote a story that might be the galaxy-brain version of the “influencers are boring” discourse — the saga of two young women so similar to one another that there’s a legal battle being waged to try and figure out if one of them broke the law. The two influencers are not based in New York, but if they were, they might be wrapped up in the current TikTok firestorm. In lay terms, their content style is best described as “basic.” They almost exclusively promote products purchased on Amazon, which itself lacks any substance and style so it can appeal to the widest customer base possible. The lawsuit claims that one influencer copied another’s very standard look so closely that she infringed on the plaintiff’s copyright and trade dress.

There’s a lot to be said about how and why certain people are elevated to bona fide capital-I Influencer status. Some of it has to do with who you are — your race, class, gender, disability status, and other aspects can push your career along or make it more difficult to ascend. The “New York City” designation is mostly a branding exercise. As other content creators have pointed out, the biggest influencers based in the city do not engage with their surroundings beyond going to restaurants, bars, and shopping. The city is a backdrop for selling their audiences clothing, home decor, makeup, and other consumables. Many of the women in this archetype are clients of the same talent manager who helps them secure sponsored content deals and advertising campaigns with a roster of brands.

As I detailed in my story about the Amazon influencers, the platforms these content creators have hitched their wagons to demand replicability; the algorithms reward palatable and ideologically neutral content that fits into established genres. It is easier to make videos that look like those of your peers than it is to create an entirely new format. As an influencer, you are making content that must be understandable to recommendation systems, and if the number goes up when you make boring videos, then that’s all the signal you need to keep doing the same thing over and over. If it feels like everyone is the same, it’s because they are all milking the same formula that social media platforms tell them is working. It’s like the MrBeast YouTube thumbnail strategy, but for women in their 20s, whose brand revolves around them posting videos from the West Village.

Platforms pushing user behavior (and creativity) toward a dull average has become a defining characteristic of the current state of the internet. Before you notice the repetition on TikTok, you’re more likely to see this same thing happen with websites you visit — there’s a reason all recipe sites look the same, why every article you click on suddenly has subheads and author bios. In this example, it’s Google setting the conditions for engagement, and a captive audience of SEO workers who jump through hoops to make sure their sites are visible in search. When your life depends on people seeing and engaging with your article, TikTok video, Instagram Reel, there’s little reason to stray from what catches on, and often what travels the most is painfully, mind-numbingly average. The fact that technology companies promise the next frontier of human creation is AI — which are, by definition, average generators — suggests that our digital feeds will continue to get more monotonous, not less.

Is it any surprise then that this crop of New York women building influencer careers and businesses all seem the same? It’s not necessarily that they, as people, are indistinguishable. But they are hired by the same brands to produce the same videos to appeal to the same potential customers, and this cycle repeats until someone new but similarly fitting comes along and shifts the goalposts slightly.

Ultimately, this debate over carbon copy influencers fundamentally misunderstands two things. One is what these influencers are doing when they post. Their job is first and foremost in advertising — how many different ways can you sell a handbag? The second mistake is assuming the facsimiles are an anomaly of life online — that NYC influencers are boring because they’re boring people, that engaging user interest requires content to be interesting, or that there was any other possible outcome given the incentives and basic technological capacities and restrictions at play.

But this proliferation of look-alike, sound-alike, and feel-alike women isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.