I think there’s a wide gap between being a commenter and being “one of the cool kids”. Pretty much everyone who’s casually used AskReddit at any point from 2008-2020 (I think it’s almost all bots now) has gotten a comment or two with 1k upvotes. You could extend the 90-9-1 Rule with an addition that, of the one percent who create OC, 90 percent produce one or two things that go largely unnoticed, 9 percent create a few ‘hits’ but attain no recognition, and the remaining 1 percent become cultural figures of some influence, if not to the point of name recognition.
For example, I created a popular meme image in the late 2010′s that I’ve seen propagating around the ‘normie’ internet every few years since, with a good amount of attention. That’d put me in the top 0.1 percent for internet cultural influence, and it is nonetheless true that I’m a rounding error compared to the .01 percent that produce the other 90 percent of internet culture.
I think it used to be less skewed, though. Back when every major social media site was in the “free speech wing of the free speech party”, ideas could quickly propagate between platforms, there was no chilling effect on new ideas, and ordinary people who don’t dedicate their lives to e-fame could make more of a difference in the internet’s cultural landscape.
I think my post still applies to regularly putting out post-level hits. The bar is higher, but still lower than most think.
I think my sense of coolness more (relative to other people’s senses) closely tracks what I actually value as opposed to popularity, and I feel like LessWrong’s popularity is a good proxy for my sense of coolness.
I think there’s a wide gap between being a commenter and being “one of the cool kids”. Pretty much everyone who’s casually used AskReddit at any point from 2008-2020 (I think it’s almost all bots now) has gotten a comment or two with 1k upvotes. You could extend the 90-9-1 Rule with an addition that, of the one percent who create OC, 90 percent produce one or two things that go largely unnoticed, 9 percent create a few ‘hits’ but attain no recognition, and the remaining 1 percent become cultural figures of some influence, if not to the point of name recognition.
For example, I created a popular meme image in the late 2010′s that I’ve seen propagating around the ‘normie’ internet every few years since, with a good amount of attention. That’d put me in the top 0.1 percent for internet cultural influence, and it is nonetheless true that I’m a rounding error compared to the .01 percent that produce the other 90 percent of internet culture.
I think it used to be less skewed, though. Back when every major social media site was in the “free speech wing of the free speech party”, ideas could quickly propagate between platforms, there was no chilling effect on new ideas, and ordinary people who don’t dedicate their lives to e-fame could make more of a difference in the internet’s cultural landscape.
I think my post still applies to regularly putting out post-level hits. The bar is higher, but still lower than most think.
I think my sense of coolness more (relative to other people’s senses) closely tracks what I actually value as opposed to popularity, and I feel like LessWrong’s popularity is a good proxy for my sense of coolness.