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Comment by CuriouslyC | Hacker News Reader

If everyone followed this advice it would turn influencer culture to 11, rich get richer, with no "social mobility"

I think we could agree that everyone already does this up to a point. This is basically just an exploration-exploitation dilemma, where everyone tries to maximize how much value they gain from the things they read, and a lot of people have strategies to pick what material to read.

Reading trusted authors is likely to be valuable, but they may devalue over time. We don't know if our chosen authors maximize our value, nor whether exploratory reading does, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitati...

No it really wouldn't. I like the authors Jeff VanderMeer and Peter Watts. They have had multiple interviews where they talk about their peers, who they respect from the past, and who they like in our current age. I have found maybe subsequent authors + journalists to read from these two.

Try to think a little more critically here. If you can't trust the opinion of people you supposedly like, already established in their craft, who can you trust?

Have no idea why you think this would increase influencer culture, but thanks for telling us all publicly how you interact with social media: in an sloppy uncritical way.

My advice for you is to pull the plug and read books that are older than 125 years.

For everyone that you consider "good" there are at least a dozen people who are equally "good" but without the social proof. What you describe played out exactly in music and art pre-AI. The record exec and the gallery owner were the people you "trusted" who king-made and gate-kept what we saw based on what they thought was most marketable.

> Have no idea why you think this would increase influencer culture, but thanks for telling us all publicly how you interact with social media: in an sloppy uncritical way.

This is a personal attack that is unsubstantiated by what I wrote, read the guidelines and follow them or go elsewhere.

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