The problem is that the abstractions for working out what gets attention/promotion on social media favour the lowest common denominator. Both Twitter and Reddit

The problem is that the abstractions for working out what gets attention/promotion on social media favour the lowest common denominator. Both Twitter and Reddit are genuinely useful for connecting together like-minded communities with well established standards of behaviour, but they both struggle enormously when they attempt to find some objective criteria which can create a ranking for comparing these communities to one another, and use that ranking to synthesize everything together to create a shared public space. On Twitter, trending is principally about volume. On Reddit, you can view and upvote 100 image macros in the time it takes to read one long-form article. So almost by definition the shared space will be filled with information that is quickly digestible, or that people have not read or watched. In attempting to synthesize and rank every piece of information on these sites, we are effectively trying to automate an editorial process for deciding what is currently the most important thing in the world, in the meantime separating what is poor content from what is merely controversial, and ranking an image macro against a 10,000 word essay. This is a herculean task, and the methods we are using are manifestly not up to the job.