Not to normies who are people people and love short form posts by "thought leaders" or more realistically celebrities and corpo brands (like sports teams or Taylor swift) they want to ape or consume products of.

They never visited forums and got on the internet through mobile phones and Facebook, so the format of Reddit is strange and unfamiliar to them.

It's always been this way and it's why twitter was/is way more popular than Reddit, the naturally pseudonymous throwaway nature of Reddit accs made it all seem too impersonal for most people.

They probably see the internet as a whole as a negative and they think everyone is just there for ads and twitter and getting their dopamine systems hijacked instead of just actually wanting to be here and getting some kind of value out of it. All protests to the contrary are only seen as proof of their own theories.

Everyone who's interested in tech be it fediverse, cryptocurrency or godforbid AI to them must be in it to make money because no normal person is interested in anything other than people and therefore must be a musk/zucc fan and is thus branded a tech bro.

These people vote in elections.

Following individuals is weird, but being able to follow certain news outlets is less weird because then you're creating your news feed around sources of news. Building around topics can lead to unreliable sources and people have to be more critical of what they read, which should be a good thing but in reality most people aren't critical of the source.

That said, I prefer making topics central because it supports community building whereas making people/outlets central makes it a cult of personality/company.

That's probably true, I agree. I meant that Lemmy the exception in this case, not the rule.

One of my favorite things about Pixelfed is being able to view a feed of only particular hashtags.

I don't necessarily think so. Following individuals (granted that you are actually doing so, and not following just an individual's "brand") is kind of a better way to guarantee that you're going to get a consistent perspective. If you just followed topics, oh, here's this perspective, this perspective, this perspective, ahhh, and it all becomes so much noise. Now you have to engage with the kind of, surface level summation of so many people's cited sources and comments. It becomes harder to judge, potentially, harder to understand.

It's like if you were trying to find a good video game to play.

You could search by genre, right, or, by "topic", and that might get you some stuff that's similar, but if you've ever tried to browse the steam store by just tags alone, you'll find pretty quick how useless it is.

So, maybe you go by publisher, or, likewise, by magazine, by news site. That might be decent, for finding similar games, through a publisher, right, but it's kind of a toss-up. If you like street fighter 6, it's a toss up whether or not you like any of capcom's other games. Same thing could be said of most publishers. And I don't think you're going to find consistent perspectives, necessarily, from kotaku, or even really useful information. It is the kind of, MO of a news company to flatten every journalists' output into a kind of unified, easily consumable, inoffensive package, to bump up readership numbers and ensure they keep getting review copies, and ensure they keep hitting deadlines that line up with, or come a day or two before, release dates.

So, then you just go to one singular journalist. Now you can trust their perspective, now you can understand their tastes and where they line up with you and where they don't. What they are possibly more predisposed towards reviewing. This is easier if they're a private entity, rather than part of a larger model. Or, you could start following a single studio, or a single developer. Now you can understand what they are likely to produce in the future, as viewed through the lens of their past catalogue. Do they produce point and clicks? First person horror? Do they make games with particular subject matters that you find fascinating, or do they just have a kind of vibe that you like?

So that's kind of why it would make sense to follow specific people, instead of just kind of, crowdsourcing your topics, and then following those collectively defined topics. One will give you the more consistent set of answers about what you're looking for, one will give you a much broader net, and maybe will inform you more of the "cultural zeitgeist", insofar as it exists among people who also want to make posts on those topics, to people who only want to follow those topics, and not follow the posters themselves. And I would, broadly, say the consistency is more important than "accuracy", not that I think you're going to get either from following topics and not people.