[byrneseyeview]

Whoa, there. They do look at the data, and do what the data tell them makes the most sense. That's what that means. You can't say that you would do what your analysis tells you is right, and then decide what you'll conclude in advance!

Also, you might have noticed that the "democratic" parts of the web are mostly terrible.

[forensic]

What I'm saying is that the quality-effect would take time to become prominent.

First they have to profit off all the low-hanging fruit simply because there is no competition.

Then, once competition starts to build up, there is no more low-hanging fruit left and they are forced to compete on quality.

Over time, a democratic effect takes place and quality rises.

There is a difference between saying, "Cat pics are more popular than articles" and saying, "This eHow video is higher quality than this other site's HowTo video"

Cat pics don't compete with articles except on reddit and digg which love to compare apples and oranges. In a google search though, they are totally separate. So yeah maybe eHow will make 10 times more cat pics than informed videos but the point is that the cat pics will be automatically filtered out unless you search for "cat pics".