Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ksey3 997 days ago
How many didnt get famous? Thats what no one reports.

If the UN report on the attention economy is saying 0.5% of content produced is consumed and dropping, then how are people getting views? It doesnt make any sense. Unless the game is rigged.

People have limited attention to give anything but unlimited capacity to receive attention. The platforms are taking full advantage of that fact to keep this ponzi scheme running.

2 comments

The UN report on the attention economy actually said:

By the 2000s, so much information was being generated worldwide that only a small fraction (0.5% in 2015) of the digital data generated was being analyzed at all.

https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_...

Where "analyzed" probably means something other than "got any views". In any case, the claim is unsourced, so I wouldn't put much stock in it.

The way I see it, people's ability to give attention is limited, but the ability to do something worth paying attention to is even scarcer, so even the most trivial feat (like writing a comment on HN) is likely to garner at least a few views.

Becoming famous is much harder than getting any views at all, because now you need to do something so attention-grabbing that some of your few initial viewers will tell others about it and your audience size snowballs from there.

Do you happen to know the publication date of that report?

Internet Archive's first capture is April 2023.

The most recent references within the report are for 2021.

The meeting minutes announcing the policy briefs are dated 21 March 2023 https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/24thunenmtg_minute... and the overview document https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/nesd_overview_20_m... has "20_march" in the filename, so I think publication must've happened somewhere around that time.
Thanks!
as long as you approach this kind of thing with knowledge of how Youtube works, I actually think there's a pretty high chance of success

if you have a good mic and camera, show your face, speak clearly, consistently upload, and - most importantly - you broadly make one-off videos about common denominator subtopics - never going too deep or numbering your videos - then I wouldn't bet against you. there really aren't that many successful science Youtubers