It unnerves me to think that skepticism is maybe undesirable from a strict hit-count perspective, if mirroring and/or antagonizing fan clubs/message boards is the only way to make the numbers work anymore.

Rob Harvilla, from yesterday’s my-tenure-at-Idolator postmortem in the Voice.

(Normally I would shy away from trumpeting nice things that have been said about me — everyone has been so nice over the past 36 hours, for real, and it rendered me almost unable to speak in a non-blubber for a good chunk of yesterday — but I think this point is something that anyone who works in a pageview-based world should be at least mindful of, if not somewhat worried about. Those people who’ve had the privilege of being buttonholed by me when I’m in Talkin’ About Blogging mode knows that I think Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com is a pretty important piece of reading for people who want to understand what “works” on the Internet — namely, obsessively going after very specific demographic slices, and turning the corners of the Internet where those niches hang out into places where people bounce off each others’ kinetic energy until the whole thing boils over. The FreeRepublic / DailyKos model — or, hell, the Gawker model! (“Unhealthily obsessed,” etc.)

I’m of the opinion that you can at least partially ascribe the initial indie skew of “online music” (particularly re: blogs) to the fact that said genre’s fans are thanks to the nature of its outsider status more obsessive — the high activity of each participant makes up for the relatively low population, and now that pop’s falling apart it much more easily eclipses the critical mass of casual pop fandom — and probably got online earlier. Hence my “guys really Animal Collective is not the biggest band ever” reminders every so often. (Man, remember January?)

But the question then becomes, what happens when everything’s consumed as either the best or the worst? What gets lost? What gets gained? (Does anything?))