Who backs which thesis — and who is only an echo?

How to read the map

Each panel is one platform. The horizontal axis is actual reach on that platform, the vertical axis the average value built from information value, cleanliness of incentives, time efficiency and fit. The line is the regression — and the finding is not its slope on any one panel, but that it falls on all five.

Five separate panels rather than one cloud, because 300,000 YouTube subscribers and 300,000 weekly Reddit visitors are not the same quantity. A shared horizontal axis would have implied exactly the addition this study deliberately never performs. The vertical axis is shared — otherwise comparing the panels would be meaningless.

Method & limits

The scoring grid is carried over unchanged from Study 01 so both studies stay comparable: information value, cleanliness of incentives, time efficiency and fit, averaged into one figure. Reach deliberately does not enter that average. New are five thesis-specific dimensions — role, type of evidence, lead time against the primary source, machine readability, and whether a source could also falsify the thesis.

Every channel had to pass four inclusion tests: it exists and still publishes, it covers the thesis recurrently rather than in passing, it is a channel and not a single article, and it is not mere echo. Each is evidenced by one dated example. Every research pass was followed by a second, adversarial pass instructed to refute rather than confirm: it re-checked 354 channels, made 295 corrections, removed 34 channels and discarded 23 claims.

Limits we state rather than smooth over: specialist and data sources often have no public reach figure — there the reach score is an estimate, and comparisons across categories are not valid. Podcast reach does not exist publicly. Closed channels are evidenced only from the outside. The scores are reasoned editorial judgement, not an objective index. Data as of 27 August 2026.

Two words in this study also appear in the morning briefing, and they measure different things there. “Echo” here is an evidence class — a structural judgement about where a channel’s material originates; the briefing uses the same word for who reported a given story and who followed, per report, per day. A structurally echo-class outlet can still be first on a given morning. And the study had consequences before it was published: the briefing pipeline now reads the SEC and CFTC directly at the source, dropped a feed that had quietly gone stale, and the one reference feed this study grades as echo no longer carries any claim into the briefing alone.

The verdicts are editorial opinion based on publicly documented evidence. “Drop” means a channel adds nothing to THIS thesis — a judgement about fit, not a general one. Perspectives, not investment advice. This study is reviewed quarterly; corrections normally ship within days. Corrections: contact@moonkelp.com.