Meritocracy on the Internet

Listening to an interview with Rachel Maddow, her comments about the value of blogs got me thinking. Maddow says,

"There is a bit of a meritocracy in terms of rising to the fore with opinion... in the blog world, you're going to get more attention, you're going to get more clicks, you're going to rise to prominence if what you are writing is provocative, interesting, or accurate, occasionally."

Now her job, and the job of any pundit, is to take information from various sources, synthesize it, analyze it, and present it in a digestible fashion to a specific audience. Sounds substantially similar to what community managers do when looking at player feedback, no? The difference is that pundits are looking to be interesting and provocative in order to retain their audience. CMs are looking to present accurate information on which to base critical decisions. So are "provocative, interesting, and accurate, occasionally" the criteria by which we want to sort player feedback? Is that really "merit" for our purposes?

Probably not. It is helpful to be able to see what the playerbase finds interesting or provocative - keeping tabs on that is a very important part of the job. You can earn a lot of goodwill by leveraging highly visible issues that cost little to address, and filtering the information you have by those criteria is a good way to get that pool of issues. But getting base issues - the sort of issues that make people quit, rather than rant in amusing fashion on the internet - really requires an approach that *doesn't* take into account whether or not they've been, shall we say, "politicized."

There's another point here to be made about how actual politics get done, but I'll save that one for later.