Most marketplaces for ideas do not intrinsically involve a competition for raw quantitative attention--i.e. a single metric like raw numbers of viewers or minut

Most marketplaces for ideas do not intrinsically involve a competition for raw quantitative attention--i.e. a single metric like raw numbers of viewers or minutes of attention (or in the case of Twitter, followers or retweets). Most marketplaces for ideas, historically, have measured success with a more complex function that also included qualitative assessments of who heard the idea, when they heard it, and what they did with it. For example classical music and jazz are never going to get as many listeners as popular music. That's not what success looks like. Going back a few hundred years, it didn't even really matter if the audience liked a piece of classical music, as long as the artist's patron did. What is fake is the flattening of the metric of success for every single person or idea into the same 2 or 3 numbers. The Atlantic is a pretty well-known magazine, sure, but it does not command nearly the aggregate attention that The Voice, a TV singing competition on NBC, does. But Twitter (and other social media platforms) invite us to directly compare the two without further context.