Memes, Protomemes and Popularity

Quite interesting, technical, detailed experimentation with data and unclear possible applications. How advertising and results are influenced

Popularity Spikes Hurt Future Chances for Viral Propagation of Protomemes  By Michele Coscia

Communications of the ACM, Vol. 61 No. 1, Pages 70-77

A meme is a concept introduced by Dawkins12 as an equivalent in cultural studies of a gene in biology. A meme is a cultural unit, perhaps a joke, musical tune, or behavior, that can replicate in people's minds, spreading from person to person. During the replication process, memes can mutate and compete with each other for attention, because people's consciousness has finite capacity. Meme viral spreading causes behavioral change, for the better, as when, say, the "ALS Bucket Challenge" meme caused a cascade of humanitarian donations,a and for the worse, as when researchers proved obesity7 and smoking8 are socially transmittable diseases. A better theory of meme spreading could help prevent an outbreak of bad behaviors and favor positive ones. .... " 

" ... Conclusion ..... We have tested some of the predictions of a theory that claims that meme success eschews similarity, because similar memes interfere with one another and get less attention.11 We tested the theory on Reddit and Hacker News, two popular social-bookmarking websites. Successful posts can hit each site's highly visible front page and then be copied many times over by people who want to use them to be able to get their own posts to appear on the front page. The expected popularity of these posts should thus decrease. We showed that this is the case, though on Reddit some posts might still experience subsequent popularity spikes; Hacker News appears to be resilient to this phenomenon. We explain this apparent contradiction by showing these posts (with persistent popularity spikes on Reddit) have low canonicity; that is, they are usually dissimilar from the average post containing their protomeme. We showed that canonicity has a nonlinear effect. .... "