It's wild that we're still having arguments about the value (and skewing effect) of social media platforms choosing what to amplify. Back in 2000, I was an editor on "Blogs of Note", which was the list of featured blogs on Blogger.com, at that time the most visible and "mainstream" social media platform. @ev had let me add new blogs to feature based on what was interesting, and _even then_ we knew that had an effect on how the platform was seen, and who became an influencer.
For example, there was this one blogger that I featured who went on to build her own blogging tools, and the visibility of being featured on Blogger.com (which was then a sort of highly-visible hub for much of the nascent blogosphere) certainly didn't hurt in building an audience. https://blogsofnote.blogspot.com/2001/04/dollarshortorg.html
