Yeah, that's my take. You see it often in other areas too - it's a lot easier to get thousands of followers as an attractive person (especially an attractive yo

Yeah, that's my take. You see it often in other areas too - it's a lot easier to get thousands of followers as an attractive person (especially an attractive young woman, but it works for men too). The ability to more easily build a large audience and then leverage that is huge (and can make a ton of money). My general heuristic is online personas from attractive people are often over valued (specifically considering the value of things they say/do - not their ability to make money which is huge) and when you compare pretty people with high follower numbers to unattractive people (or just people that don't lead with their prettiness) with high follower numbers, the latter are often better quality/say more interesting things. Someone leading with their prettiness has a big advantage in getting attention, even if what they say is dumb. There's a lot of pseudo-intellectualized bullshit on twitter that gets a lot more attention than it would otherwise because the person is young and pretty, but would not get nearly the same attention if they looked different. It reminds me a lot of Liking What You See: A Documentary, which is the last Ted Chiang story in his first short story collection - I think it's worth reading. Obviously attractiveness is only one factor among many, but I suspect it's a much bigger factor than people currently think.