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A good critic or festival programmer provides far more signal about quality than a publisher or distributor ever does.

Sometimes gatekeepers are providing specialized services that creators might not be good at or interested in.

In any event, Facebook manages to insert itself as a middle man while simultaneously lowering quality.

I meant that having a publisher or distributor provides a lower bound for quality, not that it indicates high quality. There's plenty of crap published by legitimate publishers and plenty of movies not worth watching. But the quality is even worse among the people who self-publish (talking about averages obviously, not outliers).

And for books critics typically only review books from established publishers. Films might be a bit better in terms of allowing unknown directors to be discovered because of independent film festivals, but the barrier to entry is obviously higher.

I agree about Facebook though.

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