2 weeks ago
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Have you ever wondered what influencers are like off-camera? Well, what about living with one? Are they exactly how they seem to portray themselves on social media? In this Reddit thread, women shared what it's really like to be roommates with internet-famous folks, and the behind-the-scenes info is quite fascinating.
I guess it's the same for everyone when it comes to roommates — influencers or otherwise, you never know who you'll get. Here's what people said:
Additional responses were found here.
1. "I lived with an influencer for about a year, and honestly, it cured me of social media comparison forever. Every ‘effortless’ morning routine video was actually 90 minutes of resets and reshoots; every candid laugh was take 12, and she'd eat cold food because the hot version got photographed instead. Whenever you're scrolling past and feeling behind, just know it's staged and edited, and the person posting is probably just as anxious and human as you are. Log off and go live your life. It's genuinely more real than anything you're seeing."
2. "This was about 10 years ago. He was a gym influencer and did pretty well for himself. I didn't mind it. He would film himself cooking a few times a week, but most of the time, he was either out of the house at work or the gym, and when he was home, he was usually in his room, quietly editing videos. 10/10 roommate, LOL. He was very clean and quiet, and I got a lot of free food from his testing new recipes. He also always did all the yard work and snow shoveling because he was obsessed with always being active and said it was basically like another workout."
3. "I lived with a YouTube gamer. Never again — there was constant late-night streaming (I was sometimes getting only 2 hours of sleep), and everything revolved around his next piece of content, comments, and donations from supporters. When someone recognized him on the street, he would act like a Hollywood star. It's been 8 years, and I still have chills when I think about those days."
4. "She did a ‘prank’ on her livestream without consulting our other roommate or me. Basically, she called the other roommate at work and told her I'd been saying bad things about her behind her back, specifically calling her stinky. The other roommate had a short fuse and was about to drive home and confront me. Then the influencer (who was live at the time) revealed it was a joke. The other roommate didn’t find it funny, and then neither of them told me about it. I didn’t find out what happened until months later, when one of the influencer’s friends brought it up in passing. The influencer also forgot my dog outside, locked the door, and left the house. I got a call at work from my neighbor saying my dog was barking in the middle of the street, so I had to leave work to get her back inside. Sometimes she was cool, though."
5. "I had a friend who started livestreaming after previously making fun of livestreamers. She basically faked her whole personality, accent, and voice. She scripted many things. One example was that she would ask friends to say specific things in chat as a viewer, or whenever we gamed together, so she could play off a joke or say something funny or shocking, and she could clip it. People who don't know the behind-the-scenes think it's a person who's naturally witty right off the bat. It was scripted!"
6. "My best friend is an influencer. She has set times to film and otherwise lives a normal life. The only wild thing is that if she goes offline for more than a day, she will come back to ‘concerned’ private messages. She pretty much has the same personality online and offline but shares nothing about her private life — except for a few things like a health issue, so in the end, people have a very false feeling that they know her super well."
7. "It was fun — they brought me in on a few videos, and then I started making them, too. The content was super creative, and I enjoyed the creative process, so it was exciting. Then it became a chore, so I stopped. They kept creating, though, and got quite the following. A couple of videos we did together were trending challenges at the time, and I hated how fake I had to be, like turning on a persona, to do them. They were cool with it and loved it. I didn't hate it enough for it to ruin the fun of it all, though. They did not change who they were off camera or impose their filming on me or the home, and if something was in the way, they'd let me know. We both worked full time and had lives, too. We both went to art school, and I went for video production, so it was all good."
8. "One of my old housemates did OnlyFans. It wasn't that bad. She was fairly respectful of my boundaries and didn't inconvenience anyone else."
9. "My best friend was a small-time influencer. She would bring numerous outfit changes for every trip, hike, beach outing, etc., to load up on photos. One time, our guy friend remarked that it looked like she had been out multiple times a day since we last saw her. She is extroverted and out all the time, but the number of photos made it look like a lot more life was lived in that short time period, LOL. One huge benefit of her social media presence was that we had loads of photos and memories (we normally weren't great at remembering to take pictures when we were out together). Our social media profiles started getting tagged pretty much whenever we hung out with her. Some things behind the scenes were annoying, like the time it took for her to get that perfect shot."
10. "I went to college with this girl who is Instagram famous (not a huge celeb, but she’s got a good following), and I follow her on two accounts: her personal private page and her public page. On her public page, she posts about all the cool stuff happening in her life, her perfect husband, her job, and is overall super positive. On her personal page, she is a real person: someone who gets frustrated, swears, complains about her husband (about normal relationship stuff), and who some people would call bitter in comparison to her ‘other personality.’ To me, it just reminds me that nothing online is real. Real life is being bitter. That’s OK and a normal part of life."
11. "My roommate has about 20K followers on TikTok — a decent following, although not a huge one. A handful of her videos went viral, but she doesn’t have any brand deals or anything like that. Her content is quite cringey. She spends most of her time locked in her room, creating random content without any clear purpose. She tends to copy other influencers’ ideas and videos. Half of her videos consist of her lip-syncing and pretending to ‘walk the catwalk’ to show off the most basic, unoriginal outfits. It’s truly sad, because she used to be a lot of fun and cool to hang out with. But now, she’s become so obsessed with the idea that she was ‘born' to be famous and pretends her social media life reflects her real life. In reality, she’s a deeply insecure person who craves validation from people online. It’s inspired me to delete my social media and go enjoy my life without trying to maintain an online persona."
12. "An ex-friend of mine is a small-time influencer for a very niche community that revolves around a specific hobby. I didn’t live with her, but I did travel to stay with her occasionally. She was a much more polished and put-together version of herself, and her page made it seem like her life was a constant adventure when it wasn’t (the adventuring was related to the hobby, though). The biggest thing I noticed offline was the constant drama she had with brands, other creators, and people she collaborated with. And I mean CONSTANT. She was also, unfortunately, hyper-fixated on every negative comment and DM, even if it was just one in a sea of positives. When we were still friends, I listened to her vent (sometimes a full-fledged meltdown) at least once a month about wanting to quit social media."
"She didn’t even make much money doing it, but she got a lot of free stuff related to the hobby that she created content for.
There were also a lot of ‘do this for exposure' requests that irritated her, which I understood. It’s definitely not for everyone, and I always thought her time was better spent elsewhere."
13. "I was roommates with a small influencer (about 12K followers for context). He was considerate of the inconveniences; for example, if I was showering, he turned the camera off when I walked out of the bathroom. He was also considerate of my sales calls. Similarly, the other way around, if I didn’t have to make noise, I just did my computer work with earphones on while he recorded. Sometimes it was inconvenient, but that’s what comes with both of us working from home; for example, if he arrived while I was sleeping and was on a livestream, it would wake me up every now and then. I let him know, and he started finishing his livestreams from the car rather than walking in on live while I was asleep. I was also housemates with another influencer. He had his own room and did all his content there. I would hear him from the kitchen, but it wasn’t inconvenient living with him at all."
14. "An ex-friend of mine is a small-time influencer. He would always want to go out somewhere popular in hopes of getting noticed. His head was always on a swivel, looking out for people who might notice him. I’d hang with him after he uploaded a video, and the entire time, he was glued to his phone, keeping me updated on the number of likes he was getting. It became draining. He’d complain about the negative comments, block those people, then spend the next hour fuming over it. He always said he wished he wasn’t popular, and I’d tell him to delete his account, but he never did."
15. "It was kind of funny. I was 34, and I had all these famous TikTok people in my living room when I got home. It was sometimes super interesting. My roommate didn’t film, though; he managed people."
16. And lastly, "I didn’t live with her, but I had an influencer with 3 million followers sublet my room a few years ago. She wouldn’t pay me rent for MONTHS until I threatened her legally. Mind you, the room was $1K…in NYC."
Do you know any influencers? What are they really like? Tell us in this quick anonymous form, or in the comments below.
Note: Responses have been edited for length/clarity.
English (US) 