A lot of people do really amazing kinds of things, and some of those things go viral, catching a greal deal of attention and making a person popular overnight - that the popularity may or may not last is a different matter, but the person’s mark is left permanently on the internet, at least.

Oftentimes, people’s “marks” on humanity are not necessarily because of some creation going viral, but a constant effort put in by them over several years that yields popularity either gradually, or all of a sudden (for instance, because of some prescient vision from a long time ago), often due to reasons even the best marketing experts cannot explain clearly but can try to learn from. If what makes something go viral or become massively popular was really figured out, I don’t think we’d have stuff like Despacito or Gangnam Style randomly getting billions of views out of nowhere.

On the other hand, The Joe Rogan Experience podcast has been running for 11 long years but gained momentum and a lot of popularity only about 6 years or so later, eventually becoming the most listened to podcast at the time of writing.

There’s even more stuff out there that goes quite unnoticed and whose popularity seems incommensurate with the amount of effort put in to create it. For instance, Marginal Revolution is a blog run by two George Mason University professors and there have been daily posts on it since August 2003! Having followed the blog for a few months, I can vouch for the quality of the posts - it’s quite difficult to combine quantity with quality in general, but the authors do a really good job of it! But it’s not the most known blog - clearly the efforts put in do not yield mass popularity necessarily, even if they aren’t intended for it. But 17 years of daily posts is quite something!

There’s also the Wikipedian community and its silent members who work endlessly to maintain article quality on Wikipedia - none of them are really known or are popular despite doing something that is so useful to the world! Along similar lines, the whole FOSS world and its army of developers who create amazing software (which includes what runs this website) - they’re not really popular but play a very important role in our lives without us knowing it at all.

It’s really interesting to study people’s intentions and their actions’ outcomes, and even more so when it comes to online popularity. Maybe we’ll never find out how it works!