Popularity

Over the course of the next few months we’ll be treating this newsletter more like a Substack, sharing drafts from Chand and Ethan’s forthcoming book “A Field Guide to Social Media,” coming next year with MIT Press.

Do you have thoughts about this chapter? We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments.

Popularity is a fundamental force across social media, with implications for society at-large. Is a popularity contest the right model for allocating social capital in the digital public sphere?

In 2017, Jimmy Donaldson, a teenage dropout from Eastern Carolina University, uploaded an unusual YouTube video. It was nearly 24 hours long and featured Donaldson sitting in a chair, counting to 100,000. A slide at the beginning of the video explains that it actually took Donaldson over 40 hours to count to 100,000, and that the video had been sped up to allow it to fit within his video editor’s maximum length of 24 hours. It’s unclear how many of the video’s 29 million viewers have watched the entire performance.

Donaldson, better known as Mr. Beast, is the most successful YouTube creator in the world as of 2024, with more than 240 million subscribers to his main channel. He appears willing to do almost anything to earn his viewers attention. His counting video was the first of his videos to go viral—subsequently, Mr. Beast has filmed himself buying every item in a large grocery store, placing 2 million pennies in a friend’s backyard, dropping a new sports car into an industrial shredder, and reproducing Hwang Dong-hyuk’s fictional, dystopian Squid Game as a real-life competition for a $456,000 prize. No longer sitting alone facing a video camera, Mr. Beast employs a crew of 250 people and net an estimated $54 million in 2021.

Mr. Beast is an illustration of a social media logic taken to an absurd extreme: popularity. Almost universally, what and who is popular is central to what appears in our social media feeds. It doesn’t matter whether a platform’s social graph is structured around friends, followers, membership, or an algorithm, the platform is centralized or decentralized, non-profit or for-profit. On Facebook, you choose your friends but the content from your network is surfaced based on what you’re most likely to engage with. On TikTok, the algorithm notes your topic preferences but surfaces videos within those topics based on whether a video proves popular as it’s shown to batches of users. On Reddit, you choose the groups you are a part of but posts and comments are largely surfaced based on what gets the most upvotes. On Mastodon, you choose who you follow and posts are surfaced in reverse chronological order but what is going viral (i.e. has the most reposts) and who has the most followers plays a big role in what shows up in your feed. And across platforms, popularity metrics (e.g., likes, views) are front and center for producers and consumers of content.

In many ways, this is a good thing. Social media has democratized the public sphere, meaning that instead of gatekeepers at major newspapers, television/radio stations, magazines, and movie studios deciding what we read, watch, and listen to, we all get a say. That’s led to more diversity and has elevated voices that were previously shut out of gatekeeping institutions. It’s hard to imagine Mr. Beast gaining traction in a world of legacy gatekeepers, and even harder to imagine DeRay Mckesson, a former public school administrator who has become a leading podcaster and activist after developing an audience on Twitter through his coverage of civil rights protests, doing so.

However, though those gatekeepers were flawed, they played an important role in structuring the public sphere around values other than popularity. Yes, they certainly considered whether something was likely to be popular when making decisions, but they also considered things like whether the content was edifying, civil, rigorous, accurate, beautiful, challenging, or persuasive. The central question often wasn’t just will people like this, but is it good? 

Many social media platforms lack a vision of the good. Which means as they have become central to allocating social capital in today’s world—and thus political, economic, and cultural power—they allocate that social capital almost entirely based on a popularity contest. Sometimes that means it goes to good things, like the Me Too movement. And sometimes that means it goes to bad things, like professional misogynist Andrew Tate. 

When popularity is in the driver’s seat without other values that complement and constrain it, we risk falling into what author and neuroscientist Erik Hoel calls a “gossip trap.” In a gossip trap, raw social power takes precedence over other ways of organizing society, returning us to a world of tribes and clans where reputation management and popularity are prioritized at the expense of more civilized values. As a result, power and resources flow to people who are popular, regardless of the source of their popularity.

When does focusing on popularity make sense? And how could we integrate more civilized values into the digital public sphere?

Popularity will always be an important part of determining what appears in our feeds. It’s a convenient and powerful signal about the quality of content. Though there are some platforms where ignoring popularity completely will make sense—for example, Minus, a platform built by artist Ben Grosser that consciously eschews popularity and limits users to 100 posts for life as a way to challenge common assumptions about social media—for most platforms it will be a useful and important part of their design.

To illustrate this, imagine a version of YouTube that surfaced the least popular videos on the platform. A few may be unexpected gems, but most are likely to be boring or incomprehensible. And some, while technically public, were probably never meant to be seen by large audiences—distributing them widely may cause embarrassment or worse.

It’s clear that in most cases, we can’t simply ignore popularity. The key is integrating other values that complement and constrain it. One approach to doing so is middleware, which allows people to choose from a suite of algorithms to surface content in their feeds, rather than imposing a single default. This would allow people to choose algorithms which prioritize values like civility and diversity, or humor and positivity, alongside popularity. A particularly promising type of alternative algorithm is bridging-based ranking, which rewards behavior that bridges divides. It’s an explicit counterweight to the divisiveness that’s an externality of focusing on popularity—one of the easiest ways to go viral is to say something controversial. 

Algorithms aren’t the only way to constrain and complement popularity. Removing popularity metrics, introducing virality circuit-breakers, and implementing graduated approaches to platform privileges that require good behavior before granting access to certain features are all ways to embed alternative values in platforms as well.

An obvious barrier to platforms integrating alternative values is that popularity is good for their bottom lines. The dominant business model for platforms is advertising, which incentivizes focusing on popularity in order to maximize the time people spend on a platform. One way to overcome this is to encourage alternative business models. Public funding, subscriptions, donations, grants, and even responsible advertising are possibilities. Another is to highlight that focusing on alternative values can sometimes be more profitable than just focusing on popularity. For example, Facebook ran an experiment where they sent people less notifications. Over the short term, the findings were pretty intuitive: sending people less notifications increased their satisfaction but decreased their engagement. However, over the long term, sending people less notifications actually increased their engagement, likely because they were more satisfied when they used Facebook. Regardless, particularly for the largest platforms, regulations may be necessary to complement and constrain popularity.

In sum, popularity is a fundamental force across social media. Whether platforms tame its power with alternative values that constrain and complement it is key to determining whether social media can be a reliable vehicle for ends other than entertainment and profit.

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See Algorithms, Business Models, Civic, Creators, Regulation, Virality