When attention is very scarce, and you have some discretionary ability to boost signals, any act of public curiosity becomes a political act. Whatever the content of your opinion on X, simply being publicly curious about X (minimum=liking a tweet) sends a message.
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Boosting the topic says “the needs/motives/desires of this group X are worth more attention than those of every other group I’m not signal-boosting.” I suspect it would be useful for public figures to preface displays of public curiosity with justification of importance.
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Unlike private curiosity, public curiosity of thought leaders deploys more than their own attention. It’s a public attention allocation decision. When you tweet or RT something, you’re deploying num_followers*clickbaitness*avg_time attention, Like national park hygiene norms.
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In an attention scarcity (or information overload) environment people are desperate for meta-signals on what to pay attention to. Hell, there’s even a
@pmarcaslikes account that RTs things@pmarca likes. That’s how starved the information economy is for quality meta-signals.Show this thread -
The “fiat news” concept from
@Aelkus is useful here. It’s a billion channel universe and you have some ability to mint fiat news whether you are aware of it or not, so be mindful what you boost.Show this thread -
I have always tended to self-censor public curiosity to things I think will harmoniously interest others in that space. This is from before I had any sort of platform. I suspect this is a basic personality trait. I just don’t like making a scene. I take all conflict offline.
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End of conversation
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Yeah a lot of people reacted on that, but I also saw a lot of meta anger for boosting the topic at all, a “don’t feed the incels” thing.
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A lot's been said about Trump's ability to push things out of the meme buffer on purpose. The thing you put in might target what is pushed out. Saying "fake news" ad nauseum has trivialized a good analytic term. H's recent talk drains meaning from income (re|mal)distribution.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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