The Prestige
Anu Atluru on why a small audience of the right people can be more valuable than a massive audience of the wrong ones:
This new media has grown up alongside a distribution strategy: bypass gatekeepers, go direct, and own your audience. Anyone can build an audience, and those who build one can (and have) become powerful intermediaries in their own right. So disintermediation can't be the whole story. As platforms mature, power laws steepen. Everyone can publish, but most of it has no impact. Attention is scarce. High-value attention is scarcer. It turns out a small audience of the right people beats a massive audience of the wrong ones.[...]
Every media property has a combination of status, entertainment, and utility. (Inspired by Eugene Wei.) These axes are scalable—more of each is mostly better. Prestige is different. It depends on restraint and rewards selection.
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PRESTIGE IS PERCEIVED TASTE LEGITIMACY. Prestige is earned through taste discipline and operates on a curve: past the taste optimum, more is bad. It becomes tryhard, tacky, or tasteslop. Prestige emerges when a group believes.
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PRESTIGE EARNS STATUS, BUT IS NOT REDUCIBLE TO STATUS. Status comes from the position and influence of cast, collaborators, consumers, and tastemakers. Prestige can be earned in a more meritocratic sense, whether on the basis of "taste" as aesthetic or intellectual rigor (the likes of SemiAnalysis and The Dwarkesh Podcast come up often for the latter).
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INSIDER PRESTIGE PUNCHES ABOVE ITS WEIGHT. TBPN's Hollywood embrace is this unfolding. A show translating tech for everyone would have been too generic; leaning into the inside is the prestige track to crossing over. Make the thing the insiders can't miss, and there's a good chance outsiders follow. A related maxim I hold on to: "The most personal is the most creative"—Martin Scorsese via Bong Joon Ho.
This feels like the useful version of taste.
Not taste as magic dust.
Taste as discipline, restraint and selection.
Prestige is what happens when the right people trust the filter.