A broadcast medium, or a mass producer, makes more money making something a lot of people like a little, than something which polarizes customers into love and apathy.

From this springs every horror and alienation in the 20th century pop culture.

Upside: it's a passing technological phase, and we're nearly all the way through.

I wish it was a passing phase. But people love it everywhere. I saw it two years ago on Reddit, and have since seen it flame up into a ridiculous deluge of fringe theories and an absolute death of everything interesting.

People like everything but fair and detailed reporting. News reflects this. Same with culture. People like buying vast amounts of worthless things. It doesn't matter what field it's in. Geeks collect as much as rifle hunters, they just collect different things. That's led to an industry that specializes in creating excess.

Reddit is still a mass producer of sorts, and the score stands in for money - the same dynamic occurs. That which titillates the many out-scores that which fascinates the few. (Reddit has tried with limited success to protect enclaves: subreddits. They have created smaller and more elite lowest-common-denominators. Better than nothing, for now.)

I say it's a passing phase because where tech is headed is: auto-generated completely personal everything. The limit of "the few" is "the one", and the mass production dynamic breaks down at that limit.

They've been predicting that since, what, the 20s? I've seen every attempt to give personalized information and it never works. In fact, every attempt I've seen is nothing short of laughable.

The problem with that concept is that it assumes we know exactly what it is that we like, and that it's easy to communicate that. Neither assumption is correct. As we learn, we constantly adjust what we like, at a fairly extreme rate, and it tends to be impossible to express in any way other than the extremely specific.