> Well...of course? If I pretend my blog post is written by Bill Gates, more people will read it. This is basic human nature.
I think the tragedy is that the attention doesn't follow quality or value, it follows fame and gimmicks. In your example, Bill Gates's stupidest brain farts will get 1000x more positive attention that an objectively-better tour-de-force that almost anyone else posts.
> I think the tragedy is that the attention doesn't follow quality or value, it follows fame and gimmicks.
It is, but also... welcome to life. This is how it works. What determines success is very often more about things other than the quality of the product.
For evidence, just look at the most popular products at the store. Very rarely are they at the top of the quality scale.
My guess is some ppl get tired of the moaning about things you can’t change. So short circuiting the topic is avoiding the annoyance and maybe an antivirus to prevent one’s own thoughts from spiraling negatively.
Exactly that. I already went down that spiral many times and the result is nothing but sadness about the many injustices of the world. But ultimately it's out of my hand. It's out of your hand. The ball is in no one's court.
Focus on the better aspects of life. Take care of your loved ones. Do your best to improve your local community. Contribute to a better state of the world, no matter how small the contribution may be. Pray to a higher being if you believe in one. That's ultimately all you can do.
It's really hard to evaluate everything by yourself. If you wanted to listen to some good music, you'd find something you like much faster by scrolling through the top 1000 most listened songs than a random shuffle of the maybe billions of songs that have ever existed. "A lot of other people like this" is a pretty good filter for things you'll probably like given how similar we all are (especially when we're stewing in the same culture).
Attention cannot follow quality because you have to pay attention to determine quality. So what attention follows is a heuristic of quality: has this person exhibited quality in the past. That's not a tragedy or sad or anything. In fact, that's normal in a marketplace where you have to pay before you benefit. Rarely, something novel will arise and another heuristic of quality will be present: virality.
I think this is actually perfect and there is no tragedy.
These heuristics for quality being discussed and alluded to, especially over time, suck far worse than just sticking to personal recommendations and keeping your tastes disconnected the internet. It is not perfect; culture on the internet is just bad these day across many dimensions and getting worse. Next I expect to see some try to equate profitable with quality.
No. It has nothing to do with the Internet. It is simply a property that you cannot describe a thing accurately without observing the thing. You can only use heuristics. One such heuristic is personal recommendations (which I would place in the viral transmission mode). Another is creator.
I'm not disputing that claim of yours, but you're missing the point. I'm saying the heuristics for quality you presented, when taken in the context of our internet, tend to press culture towards shit quality, or as some parent comment mentioned "fame and gimmicks."
For the record, the type of personal recommendation I'm talking about cannot be viral, in any useful context for the word. I'm talking about recommendations delivered one on one and as an ongoing conversation over many moons; Not recommendations that I see in my Facebook Feed as a Facebook Post from my Facebook Friends to their Facebook Followers. These mediums are insufficient and grow worse, IMO.
I think the tragedy is that the attention doesn't follow quality or value, it follows fame and gimmicks. In your example, Bill Gates's stupidest brain farts will get 1000x more positive attention that an objectively-better tour-de-force that almost anyone else posts.