Affinity groups rule the web

From Y U No Go Viral: The Emerging Science of Memes by Christopher Mims (yes, an article on Memes is written by Mims).

People get bored quickly, and are surprisingly predictable about what they'll share

Past research about memes shows two things that should surprise no one, but are worth emphasizing: If you can figure out what someone is interested in, you can predict how likely she is to share a piece of content. And the more similar a piece of content is to what she has shared before, the more likely she is to share it. In other words, affinity groups rule the web.

"Relationship between the probability of retweeting a message and its similarity to the user's interests, inferred from prior posting behavior." (Weng et al.)

Also, memes have a half-life. They become popular, and then, taken as a whole, they are consumed and then tossed on the scrap-heap of history.

While their individual histories vary, on average the slow disappearance of interest in a meme is highly predictable. (Weng et al.)

No one has any idea what makes something go viral in the first place

Attempts to predict what will go viral on the internet are based on the past behavior of a meme. As Coscia emphasizes in his work, no one has yet to rigorously demonstrate, in advance, why any particular type of content goes viral. This sort of prognostication remains an art rather than a science.

I am linking this in my mind to the homophilic research (the study of self-creating affinity groups), because of "affinity groups rule the web."

I am not quite sure what these two ideas together imply but I am visualizing the dynamics of self-creating affinity groups combined with the dynamics of intra-affinity group sharing as potentially having dramatically consequential disparate information impacts. I get the sense of cascading advantage.

It has interesting implications regarding books and the entry of books into the canon.

Among these successful memes, an interesting phenomenon emerges. Those that hit an above-average peak of popularity at some point in their life were less likely, overall, to ultimately break the "success" threshold. Memes that were shared more consistently over time, rather than a great deal all at once, were more likely to ultimately rack up enough points.

Seems to mirror the canon vs. bestsellers - bestsellers do tend to peak in terms of volume but rarely make it into the canon or near-canon. For a publisher though, these are two separate business propositions; basically an annuity versus a speculative investment. I suspect that most publishers want a mix of annuity and speculative success but that the first follows from the second and therefore the bulk of effort is on finding the speculative success.

This meme research would also seem to support my speculation that the future of publishing will perhaps be more about identifying and leveraging affinity groups (for marketing purposes) and somewhat less about speculative investments (which are apparently close to random in terms of success). I.e. publishing will become much more aligned with the consumer products industry where distribution is usually the determinant of success.