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The popularity of "cultural things" (think books, movies, songs, etc.) has skewed distributions, where hits get the big share of the market and everything else get crumbles. It is generally assumed that feed algorithms reinforce this tendency...

Alberto Acerbi

@acerbialberto.com

...so that, in social media, "richer get (even more) richer". However, Meta's "Widely Viewed Content Report: What People See on Facebook" reports that the 20 most-viewed posts (in US) represent only the 0.03% of all content views (in US). transparency.meta.com/reports/wide...

transparency.meta.comWidely Viewed Content Report: What People See on Facebook | Transparency CenterFacebook regularly publishes reports to give our community visibility into community standards enforcement, government requests and internet disruptions

Alberto Acerbi

@acerbialberto.com

Is popularity on social media *less* skewed than in other domains? I asked ChatGPT to plot a comparison with data from other cultural domains, that seems to confirm this intuition.

9/10/26, 5:52 am1 repost4 likes

Hugo Mercier

@hugoreasoning.bsky.social

I don't know? To me it looks like movies are the exceptions, and the rest as much less winner-takes-all than we might have thought? Incl. books, which do have a strong power law distribution...

Hugo Mercier

@hugoreasoning.bsky.social

(although you're right that social media is even less winner-takes-all than the others)