[COGlory]

This, 100,000x this. There's a piece to this whole puzzle I can't figure out exactly, but it has something to do with this.

There's two aspects at play here:

1) attention economy 2) network radius

I can't quite get them disentangled in my head, but I'm confident it goes something like this:

Attention economy is zero sum. Huge network size (i.e. the firehose of Youtube et al) means there's infinite competitors. Economically, it's a race to the bottom, every competitor is trying to get whatever fraction of your attention they can (not to mention monetize it). So they wind up competing over smaller and smaller fractions.

There's an additional problem on top of this, which is that you can't vet that many people, as the consumer. This amplifies a lot of negative things in its own right.

It's like we just weren't built to be exposed to networks this large. I think it's OK to not be completely informed on all topics, and typically this used to be outsourced to communities and specialists within your communities, each of whom you knew and trusted in their own domain. But small communities are gone, and the current communities are too large for you to get to know who to trust. So you need to be an expert on all.