Looking at it from a different perspective: creating content requires lot of work, while consuming content requires little to no effort. Hence, looking from this perspective, it's natural that the majority of us are content consumers and not content producers.
It's timing too. I would've commented something along the same lines as you but of course by the time I got to reading the comments on this post it already had 148 comments, at least one of which covered what I would've contributed. The same goes for Wikipedia - everything I would be confident enough to write about is pretty well covered.
Yes. Most of the content you watch on TV was written and acted by outliers. The products you use and consume were crafted, marketed and even distributed by outliers. First, when zoomed out, outliers in all possible tasks become more common — internet commenting is just a subset for silly folks like me. Secondly, the emergent human social fabric is built to recognize and amplify outspoken and / or talented outliers, v…
The difference between outlier actors and outlier Wikipedia editors are that outlier actors are better than everyone else at acting, but outlier Wikipedia editors need only be superhumanly obsessive. It used to be that the way in which you were an outlier had to be somewhat related to being good at the task you were competing for the honor of completing, but on social networks the only qualification is that you spend…
I don't think there is as much of a difference as you're saying.
I agree most actors we see on TV and movies are outliers (even within the total population of actors). I don't agree they are consequently better than most other people at acting. I think they're marginally better, somewhat practiced, but really "into it" as a career.
Likewise, I think you're underestimating how "good" someone is at a thing if they do it all day. It is difficult to not become good at an activity - for some subset of what that activity entails - if you do it all day long. I think most actors are good at some subset of acting and most Wikipedia editors are good at some subset of editing.
If you dribble a basketball all day long for five years you'll become remarkable at the narrow skill of dribbling unless you deliberately try not to. You probably won't get significantly better at the broader activity of basketball, but dribbling will become like walking for you. In the same way, I don't think there is a large difference in the way actors and Wikipedia editors become good at their activities. They just spend a lot of time in a particular niche.
Yes. Most of the content you watch on TV was written and acted by outliers. The products you use and consume were crafted, marketed and even distributed by outliers. First, when zoomed out, outliers in all possible tasks become more common — internet commenting is just a subset for silly folks like me. Secondly, the emergent human social fabric is built to recognize and amplify outspoken and / or talented outliers, v…
It's a problem for Wikipedia which says a central principle is that it's the enclyclopedia anyone can edit. That's clearly not true with Wikipedia's hostile to new users policies (even with the existance of "don't bite the newbies"). Even creating a username means you have to navigate the username policy, and the two admin boards (one RFC, one noticeboard) for usernames. There are two templates for usernames (and tem…
That's the way democrat-ish institutions work.
You know why the political process is so opaque? Fundamentally, it's because the people who are there making stuff happen had the time and inclination to be there. They stuffed envelopes, went to events and ate lots of rubber chicken, and did stupid nonsense to be a councilman or chief of staff or whatever.
The same thing happens in these scenarios, but with different types of "toil" to gain acceptance.
Yes. Most of the content you watch on TV was written and acted by outliers. The products you use and consume were crafted, marketed and even distributed by outliers. First, when zoomed out, outliers in all possible tasks become more common — internet commenting is just a subset for silly folks like me. Secondly, the emergent human social fabric is built to recognize and amplify outspoken and / or talented outliers, v…
The difference between outlier actors and outlier Wikipedia editors are that outlier actors are better than everyone else at acting, but outlier Wikipedia editors need only be superhumanly obsessive. It used to be that the way in which you were an outlier had to be somewhat related to being good at the task you were competing for the honor of completing, but on social networks the only qualification is that you spend…
I found myself instantly agreeing with your sentiment and then failing to explain it to myself.
I think the problem is that being good at something is not related to that "good" as an outcome and appreciated by others as such.
Let me try to explain with a bit of an overstatement: Most TV is crap, but year after year they keep making it. People making it cannot be good at it? Well actually they are. They found the sweet-spot by maximizing the profit in terms of eyeball captured they will make from the least amount of effort. That is success.
Now-a-day successful politicians are far better at making people vote for them than actually realizing the platform they are elected on. They are literally good at the game of democracy, but don't know what to do with the spoils. The difference between those two seems to be "fake-news".
Lets assume that the prolific reviewer on Amazon is completely legit. He is obviously good in the sense of efficient at reading and writing reviews. That we do not see the "good" in an outcome of having so many reviews written by the same person does not make his activity less good as an activity.
Most of the comments here are either elaborating on the OP, or justify lurking. I am a mostly-lurker myself, but I felt the need to comment here, since I was hoping to see the discussion go into a different direction. The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their…
this argument does resonate. i started getting downvoted a lot. since then, i've become much more of a lurker and have remained logged-out. to me it's obvious, and necessarily the case, that the conversation happening is not representative of my views because i'm not sharing them. it's not worth it to me to contribute to the conversation, and get embroiled in an accidental dispute. my views are my own, and i don't ne…
I agree with this. I suspect that any community with “downvoting” or similar would skew more forward outliers, because the prevailing group-think will downvote contrary content and getting downvoted stings, scaring off many who might otherwise add diverse perspectives.
But even without voting mechanisms, nasty replies are just as bad or worse, so the general trend of chasing off the people who see things a little differently seems pretty universal to me.
Anecdata, but I'm a typical lurker. If I don't have something to contribute to a discussion, I stay silent. I think that goes for a lot of people. There's also the commitment angle - if you engage in a discussion, you're typically committed to follow up on the responses you get. That can be more of a time/attention commitment than people are interested in, and with the growing toxicity of online discourse a lot of pe…
There's also your attention surface. I typically read threads/posts from a variety of communities, but might prefer to reply only on some, and lurk on the others. I'm sure this is true for a lot of people, from anecdotes I've heard.
Yep. If it's about programming, game design, board games, video games, writing, I'll feel confident I have something to say and/or want to contribute. But I also read discussion about music composition, hiking, art, diy, history, philosophy, etc, and I would almost never post in those subjects (at least not at this point in time), as those aren't my focus, just other subjects I'm curious about.
Most of the comments here are either elaborating on the OP, or justify lurking. I am a mostly-lurker myself, but I felt the need to comment here, since I was hoping to see the discussion go into a different direction. The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their…
> The prolific commenters are molding the discussion in their image. ... In any case, there is a lack of diversity in general -- discussions are driven by the worldview of a few.
The most interesting point to me in TFA was the 99.8 - 0.2 - 0.0003 rate of lurkers, commenters, and prolific commenters. It's the 0.0003% who obsessively comment (or edit or play games or whatever) all day on anything and everything that I don't understand. I actually think 'insane' is not an unfair commentary on their behavior. They very often drown out the 0.2% who participate but not obsessively, and are often rewarded with special recognition and even 'untouchable' status on various sites.
The difference between outlier actors and outlier Wikipedia editors are that outlier actors are better than everyone else at acting, but outlier Wikipedia editors need only be superhumanly obsessive. It used to be that the way in which you were an outlier had to be somewhat related to being good at the task you were competing for the honor of completing, but on social networks the only qualification is that you spend…
I don't think there is as much of a difference as you're saying. I agree most actors we see on TV and movies are outliers (even within the total population of actors). I don't agree they are consequently better than most other people at acting. I think they're marginally better, somewhat practiced, but really "into it" as a career. Likewise, I think you're underestimating how "good" someone is at a thing if they do i…
regarding actors, I actually disagree. Sometimes I will watch a movie made with second rate actors and they tend to be so much worse than first rate actors at acting, that often those movies are unwatchable.
Reddit is an echo chamber. Almost nobody contributes to the conversation, but they sure are quick to exercise insecurity for very minor things. I deleted my account there last year and life has improved as a result.
I agree. It's my opinion its become toxic over the past few years. Generally speaking I prefer unmoderated discussion forums. I rather choose what to read instead of being "protected".
This is interesting because the least toxic places on Reddit are highly moderated (askscience, and askhistorians are the two biggest examples). Indeed, Hacker News is just essentially a highly moderated subreddit, which is its attraction.