Over-reliance on popularity leaves the Net unequipped to move past cat pictures.
Popularity is a workable proxy for quality in pictures of animals because everybody "gets" them. It's a disaster for evaluating significant creative or intellectual content. -- What if Albert Einstein had to get all the people he knew as a patent office clerk "favoriting" his
General Theory of Relativity before anyone else could take a look at it?-- What is all of William Faulkner's neighbors in rural Mississippi had to "like" his stories
before anyone in New York could learn of his work?Net effect: the supposedly more "open" Internet is now more rigid in its demand for mass-market appeal
than the traditional mass media are.