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I want to think critically about who gets attention on the non-mainstream political internet.
There's a few models we can imagine for how this works. One is a perfect meritocracy. The ones who get the most attention produce the best content along the metric(s) that measure what audiences like. This is the naive view and it's what I imagined for a long time. I'm betting most people imagine that it works like this.
I don't think it works like this. When you try to compare the merit of big attention getters vs. smaller attention getters, you get weird, even creepy results. It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.
The people you pay attention to are probably put in front of you. They are allowed to recieve attention by people with more traditional forms of power and lower forms of attention, the kind that isn't paid by consumers but rather is of a nature such that they are willing to buy it. This means their takes aren't really real. They're kind of fake, permitted, virtual, simulated; what are you not seeing that allowed attention getters can't say? Most obviously, they can't criticize their allowers. More than that, they can't disagree with their allowers fundamentally. On a deep level, they just can't be honest. They're not honest. Honesty is not allowed. Keep this in mind -- I think if people were more critical about how establishment their favorite commentors are, the equation would tilt a little bit more toward a pure meritocracy.
I'm a little unclear on what your argument is stating, so I will respond to what I think you're saying and try to specify anywhere I think there is ambiguity.
I'm reading your evidentiary claim/question as something like: Why do some writers/creators blow up, while others who are just as talented get nothing? Why is it that (made up number incoming) if there are 10,000 people who want to read grey-tribe CW analysis, and ten writers who are all about as talented as SA at writing blog posts, that SA gets 9,500 readers and the other nine split the remaining 500? Or, hell, let's even give SA that his content is 5% better, why does that translate to 95% of the spoils? The answer is, as ever, the network effects created by tribal and status signaling.
The value of the Western Canon historically is that references to one work in another work form layered meanings that help us create and decipher the meanings of other works. Knowing the mythological corpus of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Hesiod's Theogony allows you to understand Homer's Iliad, allows you to understand Plato's dialogues, the Bible sneaks in about here, allows you to understand Augustine, allows you to understand Shakespeare, and so on to Nietszche and Joyce and, hell, all the authors after Joyce** just wish their work could be as important as Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, real genre killers those. When you've read the Canon you can reference Dante and other educated men will get the references, and beyond the inherent enjoyment of the reference, and the enhancement of understanding and meaning produced by the metaphor, you get the benefit of signaling that you too are an educated man.***
The LW canon isn't that cool, but it works roughly the same way. Anywhere in the SSC-verse of subreddits and forums, you can reference SA, and other people will get it, and not only will it enhance the meaning of what you're saying by in a single phrase ("Moloch" or "Barber Pole"), you signal your in-group status. I'm one of you. This enhances your credibility. So I have no interest in reading another blogger who is "just as good" a writer when I get the additional value from being able to understand and make references to a better known work.
** If you read Joyce or Nietzsche without having read, or at least familiarized yourself with, the majority of the Western canon you are missing out on the vast majority of it. Given the amount of references I pick up on, and my own sore lack of having read it all, I can only imagine how many I'm missing. And I can't imagine how pointless reading a work so dense in references is if you don't get the fraction that I'm getting. I guess that's why they make those annotated reading books that go along line by line and tell you Joyce's meanings; but the experience must be so completely different for someone who really gets it all. I find the gap in my, and my contemporaries, knowledge tends to be the music, opera and musical theater, that were part of culture. So few of the neo Western Traditionalists know their Gilbert and Sullivan.
*** The difference between Status as socioeconomic etc. status and Status as just being a member of one group among many coequals is just one of context. There isn't any mechanical difference between signaling you are a Victorian gentleman and signaling you are a Goth middle schooler, it is all in the eye of the beholder.
In fairness, Rogue's tactic very much does sound like the no-fun-allowed type of IP shenanigans that already plague other industries and fields. There's probably no reason they couldn't continue their made-in-America strategy and build a good reputation without trying to center themselves as "official"--plenty of other companies in other industries build good reputations without having to rest on popular trademarks or official partnerships, a la Coke.
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