I usually bring up this thread/idea when talking with people about things like optimizing for views or follower counts. The thing I’m always trying to get people to see is that not all views or viewers are equal.

(original thread) the flattening of attention metrics is something that seems to trip up even the most thoughtful of people. 1 follow or view from the right person is worth 10,000 casual randos, maybe 100k. this is hardly ever reflected anywhere. in practice it’s a kind of sliding scale, but still!

The most intuitive way I’ve been able to frame this is: If you’re John Lennon, you don’t want to impress most people. You want to impress Paul McCartney.

you may have to talk to 10,000 people before you find your McCartney (and I argue that it’s worth spending 10 years talking to 3 people a day until you do), but the mistake many people make is pandering to the 10k instead of focusing on finding McCartney.

The cool thing is that people-searching is – if you make it clear that you’re looking for McCartney, each person you talk to increases the odds you’ll find him, because they’ll help you on your search. (assuming that you’re a kind friendly thoughtful person yourself and you treat each person you talk to with respect, rather than with some kind of dismissive, selfish attitude)

and wonderfully, along the way on your search, if you ask people who/what they are looking for, you will find people that you can connect with other people! This is very gratifying to do. Every wonderful connection blesses the entire network

also, the flattening of metrics and the lurid quality of metric-gamers means that many people are inclined to assume that any person looking to “grow an audience” etc is metric-gaming. when it might really just be a sort of side-effect of what they’re really trying to do

money is a useful analogy here. (1) some people are obsessed with making money. (2) some people (👀) are obsessed with rebuilding the Baghdad House of Wisdom, and might be selling ebooks to fund that expedition. and some people can’t tell the difference between 1 & 2, maybe because of some insecurity projection on their part.

I don’t mean to imply that making money for its own sake, or seeking followers for its own sake, is necessarily an intrinsically “bad” motivation… but it IS very tricky stuff, precisely because of the flattening. The market seduces metric-optimizers with devil’s bargains

Greatly exaggerated to illustrate:

A: I just want money/followers I don’t care about anything else

Devil: cool, will you murder an innocent person for a million dollars / followers?

In practice the bargains are more subtle, and can be laundered through bureaucracy.

Devil: will you poast outrage bait for more followers?

and I don’t even wanna really revisit rn how much cruelty and suffering is downstream of greed expressed through proxies, but it’s very bleak. and of course this doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of, when you think the outrage bait is actually the right thing to do. Hell hath no fury like the righteous mind.