The dynamics of attention in social media tend to obey power laws. Attention concentrates on a relatively small number of popular items neglecting the vast majority of content produced by the crowd. Although popularity can be an indication of the perceived value of an item within its community, previous research has highlighted the gap between success and intrinsic quality. As a result, high quality content that receives low attention remains invisible and relegated to the long tail of the popularity distribution. Moreover, the production and consumption of content is influenced by the underlying social network connecting users by means of friendship or follower-followee relations. This talk will present a large-scale study on the complex intertwinement between quality, popularity and social ties in an online photo sharing platform, proposing a methodology to democratize exposure and foster long term users engagement.