Michele Coscia

The world isn’t always fair. Perhaps you know the frustration of pouring your heart into making something extraordinary, only to see it almost completely ignored by the crowd. On the other hand, celebrities are constantly talked about, even when they are ostensibly doing very little — if anything at all. Your clever lyrics and innovative musical composition lie in the obscure shadow of a pop idol singing “let’s go party” over the same riff used by dozens of clones. Is it just you, or is there an actual force causing this to happen? This is an interesting question I decided to study together with Clara Vandeweerdt.

The result was a paper titled “Posts on central websites need less originality to be noticed,” recently published on Scientific Reports. The attempt here is to try and disentangle the roles of meritocracy and topocracy. Meritocracy is a regime in which success is determined by merit: the best products win on the market. Topocracy is a term coined by Borondo et al. to signify the situation in which your position in the market determines success. If you are a central hub — a celebrity — what you do is already watched by a lot of people. Getting those eyeballs is arguably the hardest part of succeeding, and if you’re famous you have inherited them from the past. Topocracy explains why, for instance, many fields are crowded with the offspring of a past celebrity — e.g. 8 out of 20 current Formula 1 drivers are sons of professional or amateur drivers (the rest are mostly sons of generic rich people, another form of topocracy).

To study the tension between meritocracy and topocracy, we needed to narrow down the scope to make a scientific experiment possible. We decided to focus on tens of millions Reddit posts. The objective was two-fold. First, we asked what was the role of meritocracy and topocracy in influencing probability of either being noticed by somebody — i.e. attracting at least one upvote on Reddit. Second, we asked the same question about succeeding — i.e. ending up in the top 10% most upvoted posts on Reddit. To do this, we needed to define what “meritocracy” and “topocracy” meant on the platform.

To us “meritocracy” on social media means to produce quality content. Estimating the quality of a Reddit post independently from its upvotes is hard. We decided to focus on originality, under the assumption that original content should catch the audience’s attention. In practice, we measured how surprising the words in the post’s title are. More surprising = more original.

“Topocracy” on Reddit would involve how central in the network of content-creation a post is. Reddit (fortunately?) does not have an underlying social network, so we had to look at the website used to make the post: is this funny GIF coming from imgur.com or gfycat.com? This is convenient, because websites live on a network of hyperlinks, and this makes us able to estimate their centrality.

The results were interesting. Our first question is about getting noticed. Here we see that, if you are not using a central website to make your content, you need to be original — outsiders need to put that extra effort to see their merits rewarded (faint red line in the image below, left panel). The opposite is true for central players: here originality is actually harmful (dark red line). If you’re central, you need to play it safe.

These results do not hold when it comes to the quest of becoming part of the top scoring posts in Reddit. In this case, originality doesn’t play a role no matter the centrality of your platform (right panel in the image below, all lines are equal and flat, showing no effect no matter the centrality).

There are tons of caveats in our research. It is not a given that originality means quality — especially since we measure originality via linguistic analysis. A title in complete gibberish is highly original, but likely of low quality. Moreover, you need to assume that original content (the thing linked by the Reddit post) comes with an original title (the text the user writes to describe the linked content). Then there is the questionable relationship between the centrality of the website you used versus your own centrality as a potential superstar poster on Reddit — Gallowboob comes to mind. We detail in the paper why we think these concerns are valid, but they do not undermine the interpretation of our results too much.

This is relevant for the broad community studying the success of viral ideas on social media. The accepted wisdom is that the content of a post doesn’t play that much of a role in its success in spreading — other factors like its starting position in the network, its timing, etc. are the only things that matter. I’ve struggled with this notion in the past. With this paper we show a much more complex picture. Maybe the role of the content is underestimated, because it interacts in complex ways with the other studied factors, and it is linked not with success per se, but with the ability to avoid failure — being completely overlooked.

In summary, if you’re a celebrity it’s good and desirable not to put too much effort into making highly original content. Your fan-base is the reason you’ll be successful, and they already liked you for what you did in the past — straying from it might be more damaging than not. On the other hand, if you start from the periphery, you need to put in extra effort to distinguish yourself from everything else out there. The problem is that this striving for originality and high-quality content will not guarantee you success. At most, it will guarantee you’ll not be completely overlooked.

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You fire up a thesaurus online and you look for synonyms of the word “interesting”. You can find words like “unusual”, “exotic”, “striking”. These are all antonyms of “average”. Average is the grey uniform shirt of the post office employee calling out the number of the next person in the queue, or the government-approved video that teaches you how to properly wash your hands. Of course “average is boring”. Why should we be interested in the average? I am. Because if we understand the average we understand how to avoid it. We can rekindle our interest for lost subjects, each in its own unique way. Even washing your hands. We can live in the tail of the distribution, instead of on top of the bell.

My quest for destroying the Average is a follow-up of my earlier paper on memes. Its subtitle is “How similarity kills a meme’s success” and it has been published in Scientific Reports. We are after the confirmation that the successful memes are unique, weird, unexpected. They escape from the blob of your average meme like a spring snake in a can. The starting point of every mission is to know your enemy. It hides itself in internet image memes, those images you can find everywhere on the Web with a usually funny text on top of them, just like this one.

I lined up a collection of these memes, downloaded from Memegenerator.net, and I started examining them, like a full-metal-jacket drill instructor. I demanded them to reveal me all about each other. I started with their name, the string of text associated with them, like “Socially Awkward Penguin” or “Bad Luck Brian”. I noted these strings down and compared their similarity, just like Google does when it suggests “Did you mean…?”. This was already enough to know who is related to whom (I’m looking at you, band of penguins).

Then it was time to examine what they look like. All of them gave me their best template picture and I ran it through the electronic eye of SURF, an amazing computer vision software able to detect image features. Again, I patiently noted down who looked like whom. Finally, I asked them to tell me everything about their history. I collected anything that was ever said on Memegenerator.net, meaning all the texts that the users wrote when creating an instance belonging to each meme. For example, the creation of this picture:

results in associating “If guns don’t … toast toast toast?” with the Philosoraptor meme. I condensed all this text into a given number of topics and exposed which of the memes are talking about the same things. At this point, I had all I needed to know about who is average and who could spark our interest. It’s an even more nerdy version of Hot or Not. So I created a network of memes, connecting two memes if they are similar to each other. I enlarged and highlighted in orange the memes that are widely used and popular. I won’t keep you on your toes any longer: here is the result.

I knew it! The big, orange nodes are the cool guys. And they avoid to mingle in the center of the neighborhood. They stay on the periphery, they want to be special, and they are. This conclusion is supported by all kinds of robustness checks, but I’m not going to report them because it’s hard enough for me to keep you awake while you have to read through all this boring stuff. “Ok”, you now think, “You proved what we already knew. Good job. What was this for?”.

This result is not as expected as you might think. Let it settle down in your brain for a second: I am saying that given your name, your image template and your topic I can tell you if you are likely to be successful or not. Plenty of smart people have a proof in their hand saying that a meme’s content isn’t necessary to explain why some memes are successful and some are less memorable than your average Congress hearing. They have plenty of good reasons to say that. In fact, you will never hear me reciting guru-like advices to reach success like “be different”. That’s just bollocks.

Instead of selling the popularity snake oil, I am describing what the path to success looks like. The works I cited do not do that. Some describe how the system works. It’s a bit like telling you that, given how the feudal system worked in the Middle Ages, some people had to be emperors. It doesn’t say so much about what characteristics the emperors had. Otherwise they tell you how good an emperor already on the throne could be. But not so much about how he did get to sit on that fancy chair wearing that silly hat. By looking at the content in a different way, and by posing different questions, I started writing emperor’s biographies and I noticed that they all have something in common. At the very least, I am the court jester.

We are not enemy and we are not contradicting each other. We are examining the same, big and complex ecosystem of silly-pictures-on-the-internet with different spectacles. We all want to see if we can describe human cultural production as a concrete thing following understandable laws. If you want to send a rocket to the moon, you need to know how and why if you throw up a ball it falls back to the ground. Tedious, yes, but fundamental. Now, if you excuse me, I have a lot of balls to throw.

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