The Exponential Growth of 'Weird'

Back in the days before the internet, vitually the whole of science was conducted by writing scientific papers and trying to get them published (hopefully in a 'decent' journal). People eventually became obsessed with assessing the 'quality' of the science, that was being carried out. A popular (it's still done) way of doing this was to count how many times the paper (or even book) had been cited (i.e. quoted and listed in the references) in the publications of other authors. The average number of citations per paper was close to zero, so it was argued that papers getting lots of citations were 'better'. A downside of this was, of course, that highly specialist areas might have only a few people working on that topic to cite them. Citing yourself was often necessary but this was 'looked down upon' as not being 'real' citation. It is claimed that some people even 'gamed the system' by setting up 'citation clubs' ( "I'll cite yours, if you cite mine"). Some papers (often review articles or publications describing a new technique that lots of people later used) were garlanded as 'citation classics'. These papers generally became classics because they advanced science but, very occassionally, a paper was highly cited because its results were regarded as completely 'wrong'. The people who cited it, basically referenced it because they were attacking it as 'weird' (i.e. it was illogical and/or was badly conducted and analysed). Whether you appreciated the paper or not, the process was very slow, as the citer had to write and publish a paper (in some instances, they had to carry out experiments to make their point). Generally, the only people who would bother to do this were qualified scientists broadly working on the same topic. The arrival of the internet (along with rapid publication vehicles) has led to major changes in the 'dissemination' of science. Now, rather than using laborious (albeit of limited utility) citations, impact is 'measured' in terms of 'reads', 'likes' and 'forwards'. Anyone (whether they have any expertise or understanding or not) can do these immediately with a simple click of the mouse. On the one hand, I greatly welcome the improved access to science but it does (I think) have a downside. I think that 'weird' has now sometimes become 'click bait', actually encouraging some people to push such items 'out there' on the web. We also generally don't know whether the people 'liking' or 'forwarding' the material have any expertise to assess the quality of the item. I hope that I am not talking anyone out of reading or commenting on my posts (I am grateful for any interest) but 'science' is very different in today's brave, new world. I think it's even harder now to assess 'quality' and 'impact'.