DEV Community: Ashutosh kesharwani

Strategic Pivot: From Following to Backing

Ashutosh kesharwani — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:47:03 +0000

The Erosion of the Follower Economy: A Case for Radical Transition

The traditional digital attention model, predicated on the "follower" metric, has reached a state of systemic collapse. For the modern professional, the promise of social reach has been hollowed out by a pervasive erosion of trust and the unchecked proliferation of synthetic engagement. We have transitioned from an era of community building to one of "attention farming," where raw follower counts rarely correlate with genuine human connection or professional authority. For the strategic leader, continuing to invest in follower-based metrics is no longer a viable growth path; it is an exercise in diminishing returns within a compromised and increasingly artificial ecosystem.

The "Fake Internet" crisis is a quantifiable reality, not a theoretical concern. Current data indicates that over 50% of all internet traffic is non-human—driven by bots, sophisticated impersonation scripts, and fake identities. This environment fundamentally compromises professional credibility by forcing experts to compete for visibility against "influencers" who may be little more than three scripts in a trench coat. When engagement is manufactured through follower farms and burner accounts, marketing resources are effectively wasted on non-human reach. This "main-character cosplay" makes it nearly impossible for authentic professionals to be heard, creating a landscape where a fake account can DM a prospect or family member with a scam before a legitimate expert can establish a secure connection.

Follow-Based vs. Backing-Based Engagement

Metric Follow-Based Engagement Backing-Based Engagement
Identity Source Disposable handles (e.g., @xx_shadow_99) Domain-based sovereignty (yourname.rarelm)
Verification Method None or easily bypassed legacy systems Mandatory AI facial authentication
Reach Quality Algorithmic noise and bot farms Verified human signal
Economic Goal Attention farming and ad impressions Direct value exchange and shared upside
Participant Status Passive observer Invested backer

The status quo is untenable for those whose livelihoods depend on trust. As the internet forgets what "real" looks like, professionals must adopt an infrastructure where verified identity is the mandatory prerequisite for interaction.

The Identity Foundation: Domain-Based Sovereignty and AI-Verification

To reclaim professional authority, we must shift the digital foundation from platform-owned handles to user-owned domain identities. In a landscape saturated with synthetic noise, identity verification acts as a strategic firewall. By establishing a "One Human, One Account" mandate, professionals ensure their digital presence is distinct, searchable, and—most importantly—immutable. This is not merely a profile; it is Identity as Infrastructure, an immutable ledger of professional existence.

The Rarelm verification standard utilizes AI facial authentication to ensure that every participant is a verified human. This process facilitates a strategic transition from a disposable social media handle to a searchable, domain-based profile. By claiming a .rarelm domain, a professional ceases to be a tenant on a platform and becomes the owner of their identity at a specific digital location. This ecosystem eliminates "egg accounts" and "crypto strangers," ensuring that if you are not real, you simply do not exist within the network. To further support this utility, Rarelm implements a Three Profile System, allowing a single verified human to toggle between Anonymous, Friends & Family, and Professional contexts without compromising the underlying trust of their verified status.

The transition to a "Trust Before Transaction" architecture follows a cryptographic sequence designed to mitigate the risks of deepfakes and social scams:

Step 01: Unverified Noise: The elimination of the baseline chaos found on legacy platforms.
Step 02: Verified Signal: The establishment of identity through AI authentication. This acts as a cryptographic gate; without this signal, no further interaction is possible.
Step 03: Value: The movement of economic or intellectual capital only after the gate is cleared.

This sequence ensures that engagement is predicated on authenticity, creating a secure harbor for professional commerce.

The Backing Model: Transforming Social Presence into Investable Assets

The "Backing" model represents a fundamental shift from passive observation to active capital and influence allocation. In the follower economy, an audience is a product to be sold. In the backing economy, the audience becomes a stakeholder in the professional’s success. This model aligns the incentives of the expert and the participant through a "rise with them" philosophy.

Unlike "following," which requires zero commitment, "backing" implies a verified connection with economic skin in the game. When a participant backs a professional (e.g., "maya.k backed"), they are joining a community that cannot be inflated by bots. The growth of a professional’s influence becomes a reflection of real-world value rather than algorithmic manipulation. This creates a high-integrity environment where early support translates into shared upside.

The infrastructure for this new economy is powered by Rarelm Encrypted Money (REM) and PageStock. REM facilitates secure, native micro-payments and professional support fees, while PageStock allows for the creation of native storefronts. The "rising" mechanic is functionally linked to these tools: as a professional's verified authority grows, the value moving through their PageStock and REM-facilitated services creates a measurable, appreciatory ecosystem for their backers. Value moves only after identity is proven, ensuring that payments and support are secure, simple, and entirely human-to-human.

Professional Authority vs. Influencer Noise

The modern digital landscape suffers from a significant "Expert Gap," where high-quality counsel is buried under viral, unverified content. Professional authority requires a specialized architecture that prioritizes verified experience over manufactured popularity. Rarelm bridges this gap by categorizing presence into distinct tiers of authority:

Certified Counsellors, Verified Experts, and Experience Advisors: These individuals are vetted through AI-identity protocols and professional credentials, distinguishing them from unverified coaches or viral influencers.
Reachable Support: Expertise is no longer gated behind friction-heavy paywalls or automated bots; it is a direct, 24/7 asset.
Real Experience: Advice is rooted in field-tested practice rather than engagement-farming tactics.

A critical component of this professional architecture is the QAC (Question-Answer-Conversation) framework. QAC utilizes "Verified Anonymity," permitting users to seek sensitive help or speak freely while remaining "verified underneath." For a professional, this means the ability to engage in high-stakes or private conversations with the absolute certainty that the other party is a verified human, even if their public name is hidden. Because this anonymity is accountable at the platform level, it provides a safe, friction-free environment for professional support.

Future-Proofing Identity: Spatial Presence and the Original Content Mandate

As social spaces evolve from flat feeds to immersive spatial environments, a verified foundation becomes critical. The next generation of the internet focuses on "presence" rather than "posts," requiring a new standard for how we share space.

The Original Tag system is the strategic defense against AI-generated "main-character cosplay." By marking real photos, videos, and voices as "Original," the system provides a signal of authenticity in a world of synthetic media. This mandate is the prerequisite for Rarelm’s Spatial Vision, which utilizes human-resembled avatars. These are not cartoonish filters; they are digital bodies that reflect real people.

The "Original Tag" serves as the cryptographic link between the physical human and their spatial extension. In these immersive spaces, users do not merely scroll; they "enter" conversations and "share space" with other verified humans. This maintains a professional presence without falling into the "uncanny valley" of non-human avatars, and it ensures that no deepfake can infiltrate a spatial professional gathering.

Strategic Directive for the Professional The synthetic internet is rapidly obscuring unverified players. To secure your professional future and protect your expertise, you must claim your domain sovereignty now. By moving from following to backing, you position yourself as "early and real," ensuring your identity remains an investable asset in an increasingly artificial world.# Strategic Pivot: From Following to Backing — Securing Professional Identity in the Era of Verified Engagement

The Erosion of the Follower Economy: A Case for Radical Transition

Follow-Based vs. Backing-Based Engagement

The Identity Foundation: Domain-Based Sovereignty and AI-Verification

The transition to a "Trust Before Transaction" architecture follows a cryptographic sequence designed to mitigate the risks of deepfakes and social scams:

Step 01: Unverified Noise: The elimination of the baseline chaos found on legacy platforms.
Step 02: Verified Signal: The establishment of identity through AI authentication. This acts as a cryptographic gate; without this signal, no further interaction is possible.
Step 03: Value: The movement of economic or intellectual capital only after the gate is cleared.

This sequence ensures that engagement is predicated on authenticity, creating a secure harbor for professional commerce.

The Backing Model: Transforming Social Presence into Investable Assets

Professional Authority vs. Influencer Noise

Certified Counsellors, Verified Experts, and Experience Advisors: These individuals are vetted through AI-identity protocols and professional credentials, distinguishing them from unverified coaches or viral influencers.
Reachable Support: Expertise is no longer gated behind friction-heavy paywalls or automated bots; it is a direct, 24/7 asset.
Real Experience: Advice is rooted in field-tested practice rather than engagement-farming tactics.

Future-Proofing Identity: Spatial Presence and the Original Content Mandate

A Field Guide to the Fake Internet: Every Bot, Scam, and Farm, Categorized.

Ashutosh kesharwani — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 11:00:21 +0000

I build a social platform, which means I spend an unreasonable amount of time studying the thing I'm trying to replace: the fake internet.

After months of staring at it, I've stopped seeing random noise and started seeing a surprisingly organized ecosystem — with distinct species, predictable behaviors, and tell-tale markings. So here's the field guide I wish someone had handed me. Every major species of fake, categorized, with how to spot each one.
Bookmark it. Send it to the relative who keeps almost falling for things.

Class 1 — Scams
🪙 Investment / crypto

The call: an unsolicited DM — "I turned $500 into $12,000, want me to show you how?" At 2am. For free. Out of pure generosity.
Markings: rented-lambo profile pic, fake urgency, "guaranteed" anything, and a hard push to move you off-platform to Telegram or WhatsApp.

💔 *Romance / pig-butchering
*
The call: a too-perfect stranger falls for you fast, love-bombs, and eventually needs money — for a flight, a customs fee, or a "great opportunity" they want to share with you. (When romance and crypto combine, that's pig-butchering — the fastest-growing scam class online.)
Markings: never available to video call, timeline moves suspiciously fast, and every plot twist somehow ends at your wallet.

📢 Advertisement

The call: a deepfaked celebrity personally begging you to buy $19 crypto-skincare, or 90%-off sunglasses with a countdown timer.
Markings: typos, cloned logos, a "celebrity" who has no idea they're in the ad, and a price too good to be real.

🛒 Shopping

The call: a store with 4.9 stars and 10,000 reviews that ships a napkin — or nothing — and stops existing three weeks later.
Markings: brand-new domain, reviews all dated the same week, absurd discounts, card-only checkout, no real contact info.

🏬 Fake storefronts

The call: a cute little boutique that's been "closing down 🥺 everything must go" for two years, or a DM-to-buy shop that takes your payment and the whole account with it.
Markings: stolen product photos (reverse-image-search them), payment via DM or bank transfer, and a support channel that ghosts the second money lands.

Class 2 — Bots
📩 DM bots

Instant "hey! 😊" within 0.3 seconds of a follow. "Your account has been flagged, click here to verify." Endless crypto and "check my page" links.
Tell: the speed. No human replies that fast, that generically, that often.

💬 Comment bots

"Nice post 🔥 check my profile" under a photo of nothing. Generic "Amazing 😍❤️" on everything. Bots replying to other bots and holding entire conversations in your comments.
Tell: a username that's a first name plus four random digits.

👻 *Ghost / like-follow bots
*
Likes and follows from accounts with no profile picture, no posts, and a name like Anna_love_9928. Follow-then-unfollow churn at dawn.
Tell: engagement with zero footprint behind it.

Class 3 — Fake accounts
The raw material. Every class above runs on them — mass-registered identities, spun up thousands at a time for the price of a coffee.

Markings: no history, stock or stolen profile photo, auto-generated username, and a follower count that's either zero or suspiciously, purchasably round.

Class 4 — Farming
📈 Follower farming

Bought followers, follow-pods, "growth services." The account with 100,000 followers and nine likes.
Tell: the math never maths. Big number, dead engagement.

🔁 Engagement farming

"Comment AMEN or you don't love your mother." Ragebait engineered to make you angry-comment. "99% of people will scroll past this." Fake giveaways. Stolen viral reposts.

Tell: the post's only goal is to make you react — it isn't actually trying to say anything.

The one thing every species shares
Zoom out, and all of it depends on a single resource: cheap, disposable identity.

You can't be sure who's real, so fakeness is cheap to manufacture and expensive to catch. Bots need throwaway accounts. Farms need throwaway accounts. Most scams need throwaway accounts. Remove the disposability of identity, and most of this ecosystem loses the ground it stands on.

That's not a moderation problem you patch after the fact. It's a foundation problem.

Why I'm cataloguing all this
I'm building rarelm — a social platform with one hard rule: every account is a verified real human. No throwaways, so no bot armies, no farms, no hit-and-run cons. (I wrote up the engineering side of that — verification-at-the-foundation vs. detect-after-the-fact — as a separate deep-dive, if that's your thing.)

I'm pre-seed, building mostly in public, and if you're an engineer who finds adversarial/identity problems fun — my DMs are open (to the real ones 🧡).

Your turn

Which species hits your feed hardest? Which did I miss — because I know I missed some, and I'm still cataloguing.

Drop it in the comments.

Real Is Rare. Let's make it less rare :- https://www.rarelm.com

— Ashutosh Kesharwani, founder, rarelm

Hey! I just launched my startup Rarelm (AI-Verified Social Platform) on Product Hunt today 🚀

Ashutosh kesharwani — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:05:38 +0000

I've spent the last year watching people lose money to
scams, get impersonated, and lose trust in social media.

So I built Rarelm — the world's first social platform
where every user is face-verified by AI before joining.

No bots. No fakes. No scams. Just real people.

We're live on Product Hunt TODAY and I'd love your
support 🙏 Click the orange button and upvote us 👇

producthunt.com/products/relm-3?launch=rarelm-real-is-rare

rarelm.com

Real Is Rare. 🔥