On the writing side -- reading this helped me realize in retrospect an obvious thing. I've been feeling better about writing in part because I've been writing shorter. I think it's not as obvious as it sounds -- I think I can now write shorter because I have a better ability to connect a scene to a chapter to a narrative -- but reading you and Django talk about length made me realize, it's very powerful to be able to write 300-500 words and have them feel like they move the story (or game) forward.
On network science (you knew I was going to comment on this), I think you've pretty much got it right on. There is another fascinating social science experiment that sheds light on this: Matt Salganik who was in my grad program before me, did this Music Lab study, where he essentially had people vote on songs in a Spotify-like platform, but long before Spotify. And he found that if you run the voting experiment multiple times, each time you will have runaway hits who accumulate a lot of votes... but the hits will be different every time. It's almost random. And the thing that moves the hit is early adoption -- once the hit accumulates a few more upvotes (by random chance) than the rest, it starts to stand just a little above the competition, and that makes it just that much more likely to get another vote, which makes it stand out more, etc.
I am not so cynical as to think that books, and songs, and art, become popular entirely through random choice, but I do think that early adoption in a new sphere has a lot to do with the emergence of a mega-hit, just as you and DW were saying. When a book breaks some fundamentally new ground, if it's one of the first to do so, it has this chance of kicking off this runaway effect, and, indeed, getting so much cultural cachet that people who don't read, read it.
An excellent interview!
On the writing side -- reading this helped me realize in retrospect an obvious thing. I've been feeling better about writing in part because I've been writing shorter. I think it's not as obvious as it sounds -- I think I can now write shorter because I have a better ability to connect a scene to a chapter to a narrative -- but reading you and Django talk about length made me realize, it's very powerful to be able to write 300-500 words and have them feel like they move the story (or game) forward.
On network science (you knew I was going to comment on this), I think you've pretty much got it right on. There is another fascinating social science experiment that sheds light on this: Matt Salganik who was in my grad program before me, did this Music Lab study, where he essentially had people vote on songs in a Spotify-like platform, but long before Spotify. And he found that if you run the voting experiment multiple times, each time you will have runaway hits who accumulate a lot of votes... but the hits will be different every time. It's almost random. And the thing that moves the hit is early adoption -- once the hit accumulates a few more upvotes (by random chance) than the rest, it starts to stand just a little above the competition, and that makes it just that much more likely to get another vote, which makes it stand out more, etc.
I am not so cynical as to think that books, and songs, and art, become popular entirely through random choice, but I do think that early adoption in a new sphere has a lot to do with the emergence of a mega-hit, just as you and DW were saying. When a book breaks some fundamentally new ground, if it's one of the first to do so, it has this chance of kicking off this runaway effect, and, indeed, getting so much cultural cachet that people who don't read, read it.