Popularity symbiosis

one of the things i've noticed is that i find people by looking for discussions of more famous people. e.g. i might find some random person's blog by searching for keith frankish, or i might find someone's solutions to exercises in sutton and barto. i also remember one time searching for japanese book reviews of daniel dennett books. and sometimes, if that discussion is good, i will get curious about what else this person has done. In other words, these random people can parasitize on these famous people's popularity. i think this is a good thing, in a way. basically, if your discussion is good, you are adding value, and you're adding value by working on something that other people are already curious about.

there seem to be less-virtuous nearby actions, like just spamming a popular person's blog comments.

Related idea: building off what a more famous person has produced, in the hopes of getting feedback from them/getting them to boost your work [1].

entire genres of output can be based on this idea, e.g. video game walkthroughs (parasitizing on the popularity of the game), solutions manuals, critical analysis.

here is a good example of this: i saw that someone had inserted a timestamped link to one of Jonathan Blow's talks as a citation, and reasoned that whoever did this must be plausibly interesting. It turns out that this person indeed does have some interesting things on their website: http://hamishtodd1.github.io/

so there's two sides to using this idea: (1) using it to find interesting people; and (2) using it to get attention/as a way for others to discover you.