Unit 3 · Level 1 · The narrative trap
Social media money
The algorithm has one job: keep you scrolling. Confident, extreme, urgent posts win reach; careful, hedged, accurate ones die quietly. In 2022 Kim Kardashian paid $1.26 million to settle SEC charges for promoting the token EthereumMax without disclosing she was paid. The token had already collapsed. The feed optimises for attention. Nobody in it is optimising for your returns.
Free to play. No ads, no token, no account needed to start.
What you get asked
Map the influencer pattern to the incentive behind it
Every pattern on the left is a business model, not a market view. Read the incentive first and the content explains itself.
Why do the loudest, most confident accounts grow the fastest?
'Maybe, it depends' gets no clicks; '100x, guaranteed' gets millions. Reach measures provocation, not prediction.
An influencer with 2 million followers shills a tiny coin. Structurally, their audience is most likely to become…
A pump needs a crowd, and a shill delivers one on schedule. Paid-promotion cases like EthereumMax show who was selling into that crowd.
Feeds are ranked by ___, not by accuracy.
Once you know the ranking signal, the feed's confidence stops looking like information. It's the product working as designed.
The single best filter for financial content online:
Referrals, promos, course sales, or their own bags pumping: follow the money and you'll know whose returns the post serves. 🐜
The rest of this unit
Stories, gurus, and viral feeds: how a good tale empties a portfolio.