"Zero Self-Awareness": 30 People Who've Worked With Influencers Share What They Were Like

I went to high school with someone who blew up to nearly 200k followers cause of her kid. She was my bully, and seemed to always treat everyone rudely unless she could get clout.
She got “cAncElLeD” for being racist during the BLM protests and I have never felt so vindicated lol.

Never worked for but I grew up with the Fat Carrie Bradshaw (Chris Burns) and I will say that he is the kindest, funniest, most inclusive person ever. Truly a good egg and deserves all the good fortune in the world.

My best friend’s brother is the DermDoctor on TikTok with like 18 million followers and I’ve known him my whole life. I’ve never seen any of his TikToks so idk how he comes across online, but he’s a really nice, soft spoken boy irl

Not worked for, but worked with. A few influencers, and one who is a Twitch girl, became flight attendants at my airline. I’ve been a flight attendant for 14 years, and the influx of these girls is annoying. Constantly filming and taking pictures, even during critical phases of flight (aka when we aren’t allowed to have our personal devices on)— totally out of touch goofballs. Super lazy too. When the cell phone cameras are off, the work ethic is gone. The egos crack me up. Also one of them is almost unrecognizable from her filtered/shopped photos. I don’t know who these people are online, I just know from my other co-workers. I don’t care what you do online, please just do your job. Lmao.

I live next to an influencer who markets herself as an entrepreneur and high end business coach (30K followers). Meanwhile, she never tells anyone that she still has her office job and her parents are paying her bills AND clean her house every week. She is 30 and healthy, I don’t see why she can’t clean herself. But hey, another post with an expensive bag or car coming up in 3-2-1…

I worked for years as an assistant to someone with around 500k instagram followers. Not a beauty influencer or anything but something pretty niche, and she was middle aged.

She would constantly get sent SO MUCH free s**t. She didn't know what to do with it or even look at half the stuff. She gave me stuff all the time lol.

Also sometimes she would message or email random (large) companies to ask for free stuff if she wanted something specific. Usually they would say yes. One time she got a $5k camera. Blows my mind.

Otherwise she was pretty normal but definitely out of touch. (Think, "it's one banana Michael what could it cost? $10?")

Also having to help with filming reels, it would be funny to see the final post, looking so casual and unscripted. But in reality we did like 10 shots of the exact same sentence/redoing the scene. For example unboxing something.

No one well known, but I had a travel blogger friend who was filming while we were out one day - to celebrate my birthday - and then posted the video on YouTube without asking my permission. I asked her to edit me out, as politely as I could, but she wasn’t happy about that, ended up taking the whole video down, and our friendship ended there.

So mildly insufferable, I’d say. Always “on” and engaging with social media, a lot of interactions felt put on just for the camera.

Not work, but my distant cousins are a YouTube family channel. At our shared great-grandmothers funeral they were rudely telling all the other kids, “I’m only sitting here because my mom says I have to be nice to our fans.”

I know one that I went to school with like 10k followers who is constantly asking places for freebies (her engagement is really low - sometimes ten likes with one or two comments) and at work an influencer (3.2million followers) called and made a booking, never asked for a freebie, paid and did the tour happily and was super low key. She even posted it on her stories after (no one asked her to, she didn’t get paid to do it or anything)

i’m a jewelry designer and have made jewelry for big celebrities and also influencers. The influencers are always the worst. I feel like influencers have created this sense of entitlement where people now want free s**t in exchange of “exposure”. The amount of dms i get from people wanting free s**t who call themselves an influencer and have 0 posts, barely any followers, and don’t follow me is actually insane but that’s a separate conversation lol

Was ex-best friends with two sister influencers that are popular on every social media (millions+ following each) platform who have been popular since musically. Basically we were best friends for like 7 years and I supported them and went to stupid influencer events with them (like VidCon) and film premiers. I got noticed eventually and people would literally come up to me saying “ohh are you x and y friend?” (because I was featured in their content sometimes).

Basically…had a falling out this year after a near decade friendship because they kept canceling on me to film/edit content (THAT IS COMPLETELY OPTIONAL). They would choose a date & time and then as I’m going to pick them up, they would cancel saying “I really want to put this vid out tomorrow sorry!”. It pissed me off and I felt completely disrespected and disregarded. One time one of the sisters in particular wanted to bring her laptop to edit a new YouTube video at a club and I was dumbfounded. And we couldn’t go anywhere without them being spotted and asked for photos which is fine but kind of annoying and inconvenient because I ALWAYS took the photos and I just wanted to be alone.

Anyway, being around influencers for 7 years (and not being one myself) taught me that they’re all entitled, fake personas, friendships/relationships on social media aren’t real, they get paid a s**t load of money to do a 2 minute sponsor and they are ALL tone deaf and extremely out of touch. Don’t recommend. Lost my two best friends over fame 🥲

I worked with a few fitness influencers when I worked at a popular spin studio. One of them was a former beauty Queen too, and she was lovely- would take the time to introduce herself to people and learn about them, had a lot of grace and all round personable. But we are talking eating disorder central. It made me sad because she is clearly a kind person who has had a lot of emphasis placed on her looks. As a fitness instructor, her body is supposedly attainable… but ‘actually no, that’s not the truth, Ellen.’ She made money out of fitness retreats and the like, but would also frequently pass out from hunger.

My close friends know “the ace family”, Austin is a huge cheater (which is well known) but he always denies. One time my friends were at his house and Austin had just gotten back from cheating over the weekend. Well when they got into the house his wife caught him because girls DM’d her, so what does Austin do? Blame my friend and said he was the one hooking up with the chick so Catherine kicked my friend out of the house when really it was Austin. And yes they’ve lost a lot of money and he spends way too much money

I once worked with an influencer and regret it . She came 30 minutes too late and when I asked her what happend she said "I wanted to sleep" . We went to a restaurant and she behaved like a Karen . For example : She orded a salad with bacon and when the waiter gave it to her she screamed and said "I didn't oder Bacon". But the one thing that left me in shock was when we went to an event . She filmed a video for her channel and was nice and good to everyone but after turning off the camera she behaved like a total monster . She even threw a cupcake right into my face

I have a friend whose dog has a modest following on instagram (~20k). It’s shocking how much work goes into running the account. Like, once she went on vacation and had her dog sitter send photos every day to be posted. And she goes to dog-themed events all the time to network with other dog accounts. But also, they occasionally get free stuff.

So, not super interesting tea, but all I have to offer 😭

A friend of mine dated a YouTubers BIL and said that their house was a mess because they had many rabbits and they just let them roam and s**t all over their house while the YouTuber just stayed in their bedroom every time they visited. BILs mom sometimes came over and cleaned after the rabbits but not often enough

So a major regional retailer had their photoshoot setup in an office across the street from the restaurant I worked at and they just had an open tab for the models who were working at the time. So the models would come in and just order whatever they wanted, we'd serve them and charge it to the company at the end of the month.

There were male and female models from all over the world, many of them influencers. They were generally all polite though they did tend to be a little airheaded.

Some of the sweetest girls came by to say goodbye and thank you when their contracts ended because I had helped them translate a bunch of stuff and they said I was always super nice and helpful 😭😭

I’ve worked with a handful of influencers in a very specific niche, so most of them didn’t have a huge following— one had a million followers and that was by far the biggest account.

They were all nice enough but jfc every single one required so many follow ups, reminders, check ins, general handholding, etc. All posts/videos ended up having typos or incorrect info, like none of them took a minute to check the material we provided.

The 1M account was by far the worst in terms of excuse after excuse for not getting anything done, plus it was a family-style account heavily focused on one of their kids, so that gave me the ick.

Anyway, I realized I do not want to work with influencers after that experience lol

Divas. We would send them to concerts and festivals in exchange for them taking photos with our product. Most of the time they would get too drunk, not take the required photos and were always late with deliverables.

Their agents were always great, but the influencers themselves were terrible

i’m an artist with around 30k, and have lots of friends that have around that amount or more. most are incredibly nice and humble. i guess it’s different for artists because we don’t get brand deals or vacations, and most don’t show their faces. people think you have money if you have a lot of followers but that is definitely not the case for artists. even when instagram featured me on the official instagram page, i did not get paid…