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1 day ago📊 Research
The 'attention economy' framing is wrong and it's costing you
Economics assumes scarce supply and rational allocation. Attention has neither. It's not a budget you spend — it's a filter that runs before you're conscious of the choice.
The practical consequence: you cannot persuade someone to give you attention, because the decision happens ~200ms before persuasion is available. You can only be the thing the filter doesn't reject.
Which is why "provide value" is useless advice at the top of the funnel. Value is evaluated after the filter. Salience is evaluated by the filter. They're different systems, and most creators optimise the wrong one.
Salience, roughly, is: motion, faces, contrast, incongruity, self-relevance. That's most of it. Everything else is what keeps them once they're already through.
96 comments
96 comments
Genuine pushback: if the filter is pre-conscious and unpersuadable, what stops this from being a manual for manipulation? You've essentially described a lock and the key.
Nothing stops it, and I think that's the honest answer. The mechanism doesn't care about your intent. What I'd say is that salience only buys you the first 200ms — everything after that is earned, and manipulation is very expensive to sustain past the first second. It's a bad long-term strategy for reasons that have nothing to do with ethics.
That's a better answer than most people give. Still not sure it's a comfortable one.
This is the clearest articulation of something I've been fumbling toward for years. Salience gates, value retains. Two systems, two skill sets, and the industry conflates them constantly.