My perspective has been you have to get into spaces before they are mainstream to find more authentic signals. Web3/crypto was a super engaging crowd when it was a small group of nerds working to build an alternative to the banking system. The only people who were using terminal to download opensource code and set up wallets for tokens that were worth pennies, were people doing it for interest or strong beliefs. The same was true for gene editing before CRISPR or protein folding before AlphaFold. Basically, metrics and rankings tend to pop up more in crowded and well known spaces to deal with organizing everyone trying to get into the space.
Some metric mainstream optimization (salary, GPA etc) is worth it just to have a base foundation to navigate into spaces, but over focusing on it is definitely counter productive to finding interesting subcultures before they devolve or become overcrowded.
My perspective has been you have to get into spaces before they are mainstream to find more authentic signals. Web3/crypto was a super engaging crowd when it was a small group of nerds working to build an alternative to the banking system. The only people who were using terminal to download opensource code and set up wallets for tokens that were worth pennies, were people doing it for interest or strong beliefs. The same was true for gene editing before CRISPR or protein folding before AlphaFold. Basically, metrics and rankings tend to pop up more in crowded and well known spaces to deal with organizing everyone trying to get into the space.
Some metric mainstream optimization (salary, GPA etc) is worth it just to have a base foundation to navigate into spaces, but over focusing on it is definitely counter productive to finding interesting subcultures before they devolve or become overcrowded.