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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.
Wrong level of zoom.
Why are Ben Shapiro and Nathan Robinson "better" than Scott Alexander?
Your model should account for;
Network effects and the resulting power-law distribution in attention density.
Different variables that make up merit (in the context of the media landscape). Yarvin might have more "correct"/meritocratic takes than Scott, but Scott is infinitely more pleasing to read (to me).
Audience. Scotts writing probably is incomprehensible to someone below 100 IQ. They might be able to parrot what Scott said. They can memorize the teacher's password. But they won't "get" it. Try explaining the idea of Moloch to everyone you meet and see how that goes. There is a marginal area where people do consume content they don't get, but parrot ("I fucking love science"). But most good political commentators don't pander to that audience.
What do they want? Does everyone want {your favorite political commentator's unbiased insight}? Or do they want to shit on the outgroup with the justification as window dressing?
Don't confuse good for {I like this commentator}.
Weirdness points. Imagine two software engineers. Both are excellent programmers, but one looks like a homeless person. All else being equal, who will get hired over the other? Apply this exact mechanism to commentators and on the margins in an extremely competitive market. Even marginal amounts of weirdness will fuck you over. This is different from being pleasing, it's not being displeasing. This is the "Rule 2" of writing.
Randomness. Luck.
I don't see it as very competitive since it's trivial for someone to press subscribe. SA must really be way better than John Nerst in some way, but we can't see it as readers, because I believe that way is his friends who also have attention and who have money. This is the openish secret that is kept from us -- hey, it's only fair that someone who gets to tell everyone what to think, or think about at least, gets his privacy!
How do you square this with the law of large numbers?
Wow, who are these rich friends and how can I get money off them, because they certainly never paid me to go read Scott! I demand my share of the swag!
You are sounding like "It's so unfair those guys got to be big name rich famous rockstars and my band didn't, we're every bit as good as they are!" Well, yeah, that's how it goes.
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This presupposes you see things you subscribed to and things you could potentially subscribe to on even footing, which is no longer the case the moment you subscribe to anything. You see more of what you subscribe to, that's what subscription is.
Path dependency.
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