Good news from Pew

Pew did a survey of Tiktok users to find out who is writing and who is reading. They found that the top 25% of users are responsible for 98% of all the content. The other 75% basically never write or contribute. The Pew headline made this sound alarming, but in reality this is HUGELY ENCOURAGING.

The imbalance is nowhere near as extreme as the conventional image (including mine!) of the superstar effect. Until now I estimated that algorithms give total priority to the top 1% of writers, not the top 25%.

The pyramid is remarkably gradual and linear, compared to the sharp exponential pyramids of wealth and power.

It’s also encouraging in a historical sense. The writer/reader proportion of newspapers or radio or TV was vastly less than 1%, let alone 25%. A big newspaper had 100 writers and a million readers. Only a handful of the readers could hope to insert letters to the editor or contribute poems or articles.

Putting it the other way around, a newspaper that worked like Tiktok would have 250,000 of its million subscribers actively writing and photographing, producing 98% of the text and pictures.

Social media truly does “democratize” writing!

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Later nonbark observation: While the idiots in Congress fume and fulminate about Chinese control of Tiktok, Pew doesn’t mention it. The fuming is a frameup. In fact our entire economy is controlled by China, but NOT because of “communism”, which doesn’t exist. Our economy is controlled by China because Wall Street hates America. Wall Street (and the government it runs) has been transferring all of our real skills to China for 40 years, leaving only theories and math.

Culture is skills, not theory. Real culture is a local field formed by the creative skills (cooking, welding, mining, carpentry, parenting, etc) of a local community, exerting influence on each person immersed in the field.

Wall Street has amputated our cerebellum and transpanted it to China. Some of it remains in Dixie, which has managed to avoid the forced transitions because its local skill field remained strong enough.