Well I've been told to be unpopular, but the information has often been meaningless to me, perhaps because of the contexts in question.
Anyways, telling someone they're unpopular seems like resorting to the power of Fe as authority. A failing tactic in some cases. On the other hand, I organize some movie/game indexes a lot in Wikipedia, and there's a consensus about handling someone's popularity by verifiable ratings etc. In that case, we can turn popularity in a relatively objective value, or at least handle it as such.
..
I think I have said something like this to someone at one time. I think mostly everyone is meaningless, and I am too, absolutely! People's concepts of their own importance is just dust in the air. It's vapor. It's as passing as a breath. It's transitory. It's like grass that is green today, and tomorrow it rots in the ground. To find comfort in it is humane. But to hold of it with one's full power.. to hold it in such importance.. that's pitiful.
Unless, of course, the popularity can be transmuted to something substantial.
I think it is more of a belief, rather than a real thing, that popularity will amount to something substantial. So, we're really talking about sub-par insults if we were to describe someone as popular - if such a saying were indeed an insult.
Oddly, I see some forms of popularity as good. Perhaps I'm just someone who sees popularity from their own perspective, without a greater concept of the big picture.
(edited this post many times)