Sometimes things and people benefit from being better by comparison.  Here are a few examples.

Brandi Passante

Brandi from Storage Wars is a great example of better by comparison. She benefits greatly from the fact that there isn’t another girl on the entire show. She’s relatively attractive, say a 7, but considering the fact she’s the best thing to look at on the show, she becomes a 9. Good face, skinny, pretty hair and a bitchy attitude, she gets it done. I guarantee there are guys who are drooling over this girl as they watch the show. I also want to add that I know the reason for Storage Wars popularity, it’s the intrigue and curiosity of what’s inside these random storage units. People LOVE what they don’t know. There is a sense of excitement from purchasing a unit that you don’t really know how much it’s worth and you look like a genius from being able to pick out a good locker. People eat up the unknown. Darrel, the gambler, is the thriftiest, worst character on the show. Plus they overvalue everything. They put a used golf bag at 50 bucks and you can buy brand new ones better than that for 50 bucks. Sorry I’m watching the show as I type this and expressing my frustration.

Kevin Love

This is a little unfair and doesn’t fit exactly into this post, but being the best player on the Timberwolves is like being the most popular kid in the Glee club. Is he as good as his stats say? Doubtful. He is better because he has no one else on his team who is any good. He does it all on a bad team and he looks like an all star. What happened to Chris Bosh’s numbers when he went to the Heat? For accuracy, the Timberwolves were 27th in the league in FG% and 1st in O boards. Also note that their PACE factor (an estimate of the number of possessions per 48 minutes by a team) is #1 out of all 30 teams. Kevin Love played 36 minutes per game and is the Timberwolves. He looks good but is completely OVERRATED.

Facebook

Fairly obvious but they have no competition. Show me another social website that has 700 million users. It doesn’t matter if Facebook is good or not because you are going to use it no matter what. Even if another social website had a brilliant interface and applications that can suck your dick, you still wouldn’t join because you’d be all by yourself (as you are with google+ now). Status updates on Facebook are just annoying at this point and it’s whole chat system makes me feel completely back in middle school. I get advertising spammed and flooded with virus links. Facebook makes me feel like a digital stalker sometimes. It’s really not all that great but there isn’t anything better, therefore, it’s amazing.