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  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.

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