Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

by Derek Thompson

A child’s first social group is profoundly shaped by his or her first neighborhood—something an infant cannot possibly control. The power of geography returns with a vengeance in parenthood. The parents of students often become close friends with each other, and these social groups can be deeply homophilic as well. Many elementary schools are heavily sorted by geography (which reflects similar income and demography) and the children’s abilities (which reflect, to a certain extent, the parents’ genes, values, and socioeconomic status). Geography and schools shape parents’ social networks, three or four decades after geography and schools shaped their first social network as children themselves.

One of the hallmarks of a cult is that members unite to oppose what they see as an oppressive or illegitimate mainstream culture. But if you recall from an earlier chapter, rejecting an illegitimate norm is precisely the sociological definition of being “cool.” So what’s the difference between what people consider “cultish” versus “cool”? Both groups self-organize around the idea that the world doesn’t get them. Both develop customs that belong to them exclusively. Perhaps a cult is an extreme version of homophily. But in a way, every social network is a soft cult—a place where people can, ironically, feel like individuals by belonging to a group.

Stanford’s Leskovec says there are two basic feedback loops in every social circle. First, people seek out others who are like them. Sociologists call this “sorting.” Second, individuals change to become more like the group around them. This is called “socializing.” These sorting and socializing effects are most commonly studied in cities. But the Internet, too, is a universal metropolis, a mosaic of neighborhoods, many of which are deeply segregated or, at least, trafficked by like-minded users. There are corners of the Internet visited almost entirely by white people or black people, white nationalists or feminists, bicoastal media gabbers or Wisconsin Packers fans. Here’s a brief explanation of how sorting and socializing might work on the social network Twitter. Let’s say I post an article on Twitter about Chinese history. Thousands of people see it. Some of them aren’t interested in Chinese history, and they might leave my network by “unfollowing” me. But some of them enjoy Chinese history and pass the article through their networks by “retweeting” it. Occasionally, people who see this retweet—the audience of my audience—might join my network. This is a very simple model of information traveling around the Internet, but it has two important implications. First, social networks often sort themselves by bringing like-minded people together. They evolve toward homophily. Second, growing my popularity on a social network like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram is about appea...

He built his own social network with tens of thousands of buyers, but, ironically, he did it not by writing jokes for all ten thousand people at once, but by writing jokes for just a few of them at a time.

The most popular mobile apps in the world are various shades of self-expression.

Remember Watts’s and Leskovec’s rules for popularity: Ideas spread most reliably when they piggyback off an existing network of closely connected and interested people. In other words, if you’re trying to attract groups, find common points of origin. To build an early user base, Wolfe had to go somewhere hundreds, hopefully even thousands, of single people were already connected. So she went back to school. Wolfe had graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, which is well known for its culture of bacchanalia. She understood what she called “the Southern college experience.” To find users, she first went to the sororities. “I’d walk into the house and I’d ask them to download Tinder as a favor to me,” she said. “I would tell them I was a young working woman who needed their support, and also, by the way, every cute guy on campus was going to join this thing in the next twenty minutes, because I was walking straight to the frat houses after I left.”

Tinder sent Wolfe to prominent colleges around the country with the same playbook, according to Joe Munoz, who helped to build Tinder’s back-end code. “Her pitch was pretty genius,” he told Bloomberg. “She would go to chapters of her sorority, do her presentation, and have all the girls at the meetings install the app. Then she’d go to the corresponding brother fraternity—they’d open the app and see all these cute girls they knew.” There were fewer than five thousand users on Tinder before Wolfe’s cross-country jaunt. By the time she returned, there were some fifteen thousand. “The avalanche had started,” Munoz said. Facebook’s early success followed a similar pattern. The company started in 2004 as a directory for college students at Harvard University and other selective colleges. It spread rapidly between young people who were already connected to each other by classes, dorms, and extracurricular activities. Like Tinder, its growth relied on a “bowling pin strategy,” where a product is adopted by a small niche, a densely connected network that already exists, like a bowling ball smashing into a tidy arrangement of pins. The social network wouldn’t have been useful if it found one thousand people randomly distributed around the world. But Facebook wasn’t trying to create new connections so much as it wanted to digitize—and, perhaps, deepen—the millions of student relationships that already existed.

a person can only be advertised so many times in the same format before they become cynical,” Wolfe said. “My brain is constantly looking for where you are trying to advertise to me. Visiting the sororities worked for a long time, but now I think it’s about finding the right person inside of each network who can act as my proxy.” The most important element in a global cascade isn’t magically viral elements or mystical influencers. Rather it is about finding a group of people who are easily influenced. It turns the influencer question on its head. Don’t ask, “Who is powerful?” Instead ask, “Who is vulnerable?” In Duncan Watts’s computer models, global cascades happen when a trigger hits a densely connected audience clustered around a commonality, a soft cult. Whitney Wolfe discovered the same. “I often ask my team if they’d rather advertise on a New York City taxi or with a sticker on a backpack,” she said. “The NYC taxi cab will be seen by thousands of people, and the backpack sticker might only create curiosity among a handful.” But Wolfe, like Vincent Forrest, prefers the smaller emblem of identity, a jumping-off point for a conversation between friends. “When I’m doing my job well,” Forrest told me, “I’m saying something precise that is specific enough that it feels personal and relatable to others with the same interests.” The world isn’t a uniformly connected glob of people. It’s still a billion clusters, cliques, and cults. What Watts sees in his models, what Wolfe s...

You spend your childhood trying to fit in, your adult life trying to stand out

A 2012 Harvard study found that people use about one third of personal conversations to talk about themselves. Online, that number jumps to 80 percent. A person’s egoism quotient more than doubles when she opens a computer or lock screen. Look back at the Facebook article list: Nine of the ten stories have the words “you” or “your,” which, to each reader, mean “me” and “mine.” Offline, one on one, I talk to other people. Online, one to one thousand, I talk (and read) about myself.

People were more forthright about the bad stuff in their lives when they thought they were addressing one person. When they thought they were addressing a larger group, they airbrushed their stories for dazzling happiness.

It is the vanity of crowds: Simply knowing that we’re talking to a large audience shapes the information we share and how we describe what we know. In the last few years, several social critics have wondered why social media profiles are galleries of self-love. Perhaps it’s not so much that Facebook is turning us into narcissists, but rather that Facebook is tapping into the natural narcissism of all broadcasts. One to many, we sculpt, smooth, and sand our life stories; mammal to mammal, we’re more likely to relate.

In the play Cyrano de Bergerac, Cyrano and Christian are foils. But in the real world, many people are both the silver-tongued Cyrano and leaden Christian in one body. They sparkle with wit and panache in front of a keyboard or a piece of paper. But dumped before a friend, a date, or a boss without a script, they’ll talk about their marriage woes or the awful commute.

One source of the online-offline communication gap is, simply, time. Speaking is hand-to-hand combat. Like sword fighting, it requires repartee, quippy thrusts, instinctive parries, and little opportunity to rest your weapon and simply think. Speakers are so attuned to their talking partners that conversations have a kind of universal time signature, a standard cadence of chitchat. Psycholinguists have observed that speakers across many languages and cultures pause for an average of two milliseconds before the “right” to talk is passed between them. Linguists have found this global recognition of ideal pauses in Italian, Dutch, Danish, Japanese, Korean, Lao, A–khoe Haillom (from Namibia), Yélî-Dnye (from Papua New Guinea), and Tzeltal (a Mayan language from Mexico). Written communications isn’t like fencing. It’s more like programming a long-range missile. You have time to choose a target and refine it, and if you find yourself going astray, there is always a delete key. The difference in time leads to a difference in focus. Speaking to one person, my attention falls naturally on my fellow conversationalist. Speaking to one thousand people online—for example, in a post on Facebo...

Hmm, yet Apple outperforms them on usability?