Attention - the most important currency in the modern world. We live in an abundance world.
People usually think about others and be like "how would they think of me? Do they hate me?" And the most common scenario for a normal person, they don't hate you, they don't like you, they just forgot about you. In the modern world, attention is like oil, and it's very expensive.
If you think being popular and cool is just silly and only fundamental hard power matters, that is a huge misconception. Some of the biggest companies in the world, Meta, Google, ByteDance, Tencent, or even partially Amazon, are ad companies. The tech required for a basic functional platform without the ads algorithms matured years ago. Today, especially with LLMs, a junior developer can build a CRUD platform for a million users. The tech requried to build a basic billion user platform is worth far less than their actual market worth. Their only purpose is grabbing people's attention. Apple is a hardware company, but it uses App Store to force developers to pay them.
In the modern world, almost anything that grabs attention, whether it's rage, anxiety, cringe, humor, being silly, soothing people's egos, can be converged into money and social leverage.
Previously I thought the 991 rule was supposed to be mean like for 100 videos you watched, you leave a comment on 10 videos, and you upload one video of yourself (or for every 100 minutes you consume you upload 1 minute). I have the mindset that if a platform denies me my voice, I am not going to love the platform, or at least they won't have my support. I was used to public speaking or debating competitions, where if you don't speak, you get defeated by someone else. If you aren't aggressive, others grab the microphone and you don't get a point delivered. Some people claim, "I am not good enough and I do not deserve it." This is highly self-defeating - you don't "deserve" it, you fight and claim it. With that grinding mindset, if people are opting out and not posting anything, obviously I am taking up my space. I want to have a voice and show people who I am.
In Eastern Europe, clowns had serious respect. In Soviet times, the clowns criticized the government and their performance had highly sophisicated sarcasm and profound meanings. Being a clown, as long as you can grab people's attention, is a massive achievement.
Finally, there are those "attention black holes" - gaming. Someone makes an online game, they don't have to perform, write long scripts, edit videos, or even show their face, and people just drops in an "arena" to fight endlessly. Gaming captures the attention of millions of people, especially those anxious people finding an escape, obviously, their time and money. Gaming is just genius in today's attention driven world.