One critical assumption behind discussions like that is that popularity is strongly correlated to quality. But that just doesn't seem true in practice—popularit

One critical assumption behind discussions like that is that popularity is strongly correlated to quality. But that just doesn't seem true in practice—popularity is the result of complex social dynamics and isn't strongly correlated to any intrinsic qualities of whatever becomes popular. We come up with compelling narratives about whey one thing gets popular and another doesn't after the fact, but these are just rationalizations; we can't use them to make good predictions and they do a poor job of representing the social processes involved. We can see this in a microcosm when we consider music. What makes music popular? To a large extent, it's music that's listened to by the right people at the right time—perhaps seeded intelligently with exposure and marketing. There are some minimal bars the music itself has to pass, of course: it can't be terrible and it has to be accessible, but those aren't high bars to clear. There are thousands of bands as good or better than most of the ones you hear on the radio but they don't get anywhere. You just never hear them, or they never catch on among your friends and never make inroads into your social network. (Or, more importantly, into the social networks of the labels that push music in practice.) Unless they do, in which case you have some unknown band "going viral"—virality says a lot about how something spreads and little about the thing itself. It doesn't even matter what you mean by "better": some objective notion of quality, musical sophistication, aesthetics, "catchiness", pertinent lyrics... whatever. That's not the main driver of popularity. Nautilus had a great article[1] about this a while back, based on some experiments run with music. They created several large groups of participants listening to the same set of 40 musical tracks over time. People in the control group listened to music independently; the other groups all had social feedback mechanisms within the groups. The results were all over the place: the popularity of songs was completely inconsistent across groups, and could be traced to early chance decisions that snowballed over time. The article had a great analogy about how the whole process worked: > …a single match is not the entire reason for a wildfire starting and spreading. But that’s exactly how we naturally think about social wildfires: that the match is the key. In fact, there are two requirements: a local requirement (a spark), and a global requirement (the ability of the fire to spread). And it’s the second component that is actually the bottleneck: If a forest is dangerously dry, any spark can start a fire. Sparks are easy to come by, and are not intrinsically special. The programming language in question? Its qualities? Pragmatism? Purity? Elegance? All just sparks. Which one starts the biggest fire depends far more on its context than the spark itself. [1]: http://nautil.us/issue/5/fame/homo-narrativus-and-the-trouble-with-fame http://nautil.us/issue/5/fame/homo-narrativus-and-the-troubl... (The article was written by a researcher in the field and cites a few papers on the topic, if you want to read more.)