<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Popehat" class="u-url mention">@<span>Popehat</span></a></span> Long time scroller, occasional poster.</p><p>Something I think a lot of people don't have an intuitive understanding of is how interacting with a social media platform becomes a very different experience once you become popular ("popular") on it.</p><p>At my level, Mastodon is a place where a bunch of smart people share their special interests and I get to read about them every day. I also seldom post, though, so I don't read comments.</p><p>At any level of non-trivial level of popularity, however, Mastodon (or, more accurately, a small but very vocal subset of its users) seems to do a great job of convincing popular people that they should be popular literally anywhere else with anyone else. It's as if the intentionally "anti-viral" nature of the platform causes some people to lose their senses when they're exposed to something that isn't directly created from their carefully curated follows list.</p>
