I’ve never placed a lot of value on popularity and what I do is mostly negative.

Case in point: people who use computers for nothing but email and browsing continue to pay Microsoft for inferior work when better-performing alternatives are free.

Popular music is now the worst music there is. People still listen to it, even pay for it. Ditto movies.

And in software people enthusiastically follow methodology fads that do little more than interrupt them and add layers of useless process.

Popularity is not axiomatically a good thing.