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When your job is to get people to pay attention to you, why would categorize anything as less than the most important? Crowd-sourcing the importance might be better, but that brings us right back to a HN/reddit solution.

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You could make the bet that credibility today is worth increased attention tomorrow. I guess lots of people might not think that is a good bet.

In practice, attention is credibility. You can look at this as a cultural problem[1], a psychological finding[2], a propaganda tool[3], a business model[4], etc.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Postman [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book) [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Peretti

I guess credibility is a poor word choice. I meant something more like trustworthiness (which might tend to build credibility with a certain demographic...).

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