Here, reddit, twitter, across the web people are asking a simple question

Why are we so fascinated by certain stories and not others?

Not talking just the royal birth thing but celebrities, the Zimmerman trial, which celebrity did what with whom, and so on.

I am someone who posts a huge cross section of stories both here and at reddit. Sometimes on Fark and also on my twitter and FB accounts.

A few things of late: Fukushima, Drone stories (2 today), Some stuntmen who saved a woman, clashes in France over veils, SEC going after a billionaire, and so on.

What people have replied the most too: Breastfeeding story (430 replies), ban on smoking in parks, Judge giving back money to a stripper, a swastika. Thankfully one other 'popular' one dealt with the NSA.

Sorting by replies in GD a lot of guns and zimmerman threads with some snowden tossed in for good measure.

Hours a day trying to find interesting stories that are worth seeing and could well engage the readers on many topics and the same pattern emerges time after time.

As much as we like to think we and others online are different than the cnn/nancy grace/tmz crowd we really are not. The same hot topics others are talking about we are as well (myself included when it comes to the discussion side).

--- My take on the Why Side of it

I can't do jack about the drones until election day. I already know how I feel about them and many other topics. It's old news as well as new news. We like to jump from topic to topic on a discussion basis and don't need to really dwell on things which we see as obvious. We talk a lot about some topics and debate them because we don't fully agree on the resolutions (guns, smoking, etc and so - the old popular topics here) - we have our minds made up, others do, so those topics increase discussion.

Royal birth? The discussion is more about why we should care and trying to tell others why they shouldn't than the actual birth. Lord knows what would happen if Kate had decided to have an abortion....

We 'know' famous people more than we do others. We all see them in our homes on TV's so have a connection to them. We don't connect so much with the people who were suffering from and earthquake in China and how they lost their whole village. Never even heard of the village before today.

Folks talk about what is familiar to them and impacts them. And that is not so bad really, it is part of who we are.

But when it comes down to the real shit. The laws and such. No matter what we talk about here we try to have the back of people we never even heard of and work to help people we will never meet or know the name of.

Let people have their talks, their discussions on general issues, even if they seem like trivial BS to some of us. We are human, have thoughts on issues, some things we like more than others. It's ok to want to talk about the new Superman movie with Batman coming out because you can still care about and be pissed about how people are treated elsewhere in the world.

You don't have to be mad and raging 24x7 on every issue. We all need an outlet from such things, but we don't all have to be equally outraged at the same time.