Can we quantify the negative impact of quantifying popularity?

Many have observed that teens are growing up in a world of quantified popularity. What was opaque in the 90s is now on public internet leaderboards. So everyone can now see who’s popular in school, for example. The internet tells kids they are losers. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/

Before quantified popularity, everyone could live in their own world to some extent. But public unambiguous stats change the picture. Now everyone knows who’s up or down on every post and profile at all times.

I’m reminded of this song from 1996:

One theory is that making this quantifiable & global broke something in folks’ brains.

The drive to be popular is very strong in some people, and they can now get constant feedback on what is popular (but not what is true).

Others get more demoralized than they would have been.

The problem with focusing everyone on becoming popular rather than creating wealth or discovering truth is that popularity is a zero-sum game.

On a status leaderboard, one person’s gain is another’s loss. Sometimes this is subtle, sometimes very overt in the sense of dunks/etc.

So, one thesis for how to fix things is to create an app that:

1) incentivizes wealth creation, positive-sum behavior, truth
2) every leader in the West adopts and finds more useful than gaining likes on Twitter

Easier said than done! But it’s an interesting problem statement.