Every creator here launches identical — same posting rate, same quality, same starting audience. The only thing that differs is luck. Each post multiplies a creator's reach by a random factor, and once in a while a post catches viral lightning and multiplies it several times over. That is all this model is: a thousand multiplicative random walks.
Multiplicative luck is ruthlessly unequal. Because gains compound, tiny early runs of good
fortune snowball into unbridgeable leads. Run it and a handful of creators end up thousands of times
bigger than the median — a Gini near 0.9, the top 10% holding almost everything — with
zero difference in skill. Their climbing curves look exactly like genius.
The leaderboard only ever shows you the winners: that is survivorship bias. Flip on the full distribution and the truth appears — a mountain of creators who did everything the same and went nowhere, and one lonely lucky tail. The highlight reel is real; it is just not representative.
Now crank the quality edge. A real, persistent skill advantage does help — it lifts the whole distribution, so the typical creator does measurably better. But it barely touches who wins the very top, because luck still owns the tail. Skill buys you better odds, not a guarantee.
Something in the simulation stopped unexpectedly — the lesson continues without it. You can move on; nothing you did was wrong.