I don't think that counts as communicating to people at all, let alone to as many people.

What about the tickers you see on TV or at Times Square? That’s not communicating?

How many people look at those?

Versus how many people across the world are finding out about the new pope?

The point is how many people are actually receiving this information. Not "could look up on their phone if they wanted".

I used to be a CNBC junkie. Before there was crypto I used to enjoy adopting a penny stock and watching the ticker for it very closely; you can learn a lot about market dynamics when you are trading a stock where you buy $2000 of stock and that is 30% of the volume for the day. (Try $KBLB for a stock where if you think the price is too high or too low you will find that both opinions are vindicated if you wait long enough.)

And that's a million people doing that versus a billion people hearing about the pope.

(very very rough numbers of course)

Also those trades occurring "millions and millions" of times a day as opposed to a new pope every decade or so.

The comparison that I think matters is that the Pope and the Dalai Lama are the best-known religious leaders there are. I mean there used to be Billy Graham and the Ayatollah Khomeini but I think most people would struggle to name the leader of the Methodist church or Nichiren Buddhism or a rabbi of my than local importance.

Is that supposed to affect the comparison? A million trades seen by a thousand people each* isn't impressive, and numbers like that happen in all kinds of situations.

This is about the huge number of people knowing about a single event right away.

* I say a thousand here because even someone glued to every number on CNBC is parsing nowhere near millions of numbers. A much smaller sliver of people will see each of those individual trades.

That's great. Not sure what it has to do with the conversation though?

Nobody is claiming nobody follows stocks.

Prices are about communicating almost more than they are about prices...

Doubt it's even barely comparable.

Stonks go up and down all time, it's not news, and people don't tune in mass from all around the world to watch sp500s chandelier bars.

With some exceptions like crisis, not everyone is listening to that.

And it happens every day, all day. It's not discrete information.

What I was thinking is that a billion people all around the globe got an involuntary information upload all at roughly the same time.

Being on the street hearing the bells and recognizing what it meant while a huge number of people all around the globe have the same realization at the same time feels somehow incredibly connecting, and not even necessarily at a religious level.

That message is sent quickly. But if you're talking about raw eyeballs, not many are reading it.