Ask HN: Idea Propagation through Social Networks? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Idea Propagation through Social Networks?

10 pointsrajansaini11 comments

I'd like to learn about how ideas propagate through ordinary social networks via word of mouth. It seems like a very rich problem that could combine theories from graph theory, game theory, psychology, and epidemiological modeling. Are there any rigorous treatments of this problem?

Bonus points if they discuss requirements for widespread diffusion or possibly have a marketing-based skew.

Apologies if I break any HN rules, spoken or unspoken; I have not posted very often.

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You basically should read all of https://arxiv.org/list/physics.soc-ph/recent Physics and Society

https://arxiv.org/list/cs.SI/recent Social and Information Networks

Two random samplings look to be right on topic, search for survey papers in both disciplines.

Spreading of Memes on Multiplex Networks https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.12630

A model for meme popularity growth in social networking systems based on biological principle and human interest dynamics https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.00533

Whoa thanks!! I'll definitely take a look! Have you happened to come across anything dealing with optimal initial conditions that was particularly noteworthy?

You might be interested in this paper: "The Majority Illusion in Social Networks", https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.03022

Abstract:

Social behaviors are often contagious, spreading through a population as individuals imitate the decisions and choices of others. A variety of global phenomena, from innovation adoption to the emergence of social norms and political movements, arise as a result of people following a simple local rule, such as copy what others are doing. However, individuals often lack global knowledge of the behaviors of others and must estimate them from the observations of their friends' behaviors. In some cases, the structure of the underlying social network can dramatically skew an individual's local observations, making a behavior appear far more common locally than it is globally. We trace the origins of this phenomenon, which we call "the majority illusion," to the friendship paradox in social networks. As a result of this paradox, a behavior that is globally rare may be systematically overrepresented in the local neighborhoods of many people, i.e., among their friends. Thus, the "majority illusion" may facilitate the spread of social contagions in networks and also explain why systematic biases in social perceptions, for example, of risky behavior, arise. Using synthetic and real-world networks, we explore how the "majority illusion" depends on network structure and develop a statistical model to calculate its magnitude in a network.

In case anyone's interested, mindcrime's comment lead me down a series of links, and I found this: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/

Seems to be exactly what I'm looking for! If anyone knows anything at all in this area, no matter how small, please share!

The closest thing I'm aware of is the work on "diffusion of innovations".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

If you look at this stuff, and you're familiar with the Crossing the Chasm idea, you may be struck immediately by the similarity of some of the charts. There was definitely some influence by the former, on the latter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm

Also, there is an interdisciplinary field called "Network Science" that heavily builds on graph theory, but includes elements from sociology, economics, complex adaptive systems, statistical mechanics, etc, yadda yadda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_science

Oooh very interesting, thanks! From what I've skimmed, it's so surprising how well his ideas transfer over to the present era!

Edit: Did not read the second half of your comment, absolutely!!

Edit: Did not read the second half of your comment, absolutely!!

I've been editing stuff in kinda piecemeal. :-)

Forgot to mention this earlier, but two other related areas that you might find worth studying are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_physics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_analysis

Look into network science. Albert-László Barabási does cool work in the space.

Don't get too dazzled by proxies.

Ideas propagate through people. If you want to get people, read some fiction, some history, and some philosophy.

This is gold to me, thank you.

I apologize, what do you mean by proxies?

Do you have any recommendations for a less-abstracted view of history (focusing on individuals rather than their emergent structures)? Or branches of philosophy that are particularly illuminating in this context?

People have tackled this stuff for millennia. By all means focus on the emergent structures, as that's the only way to learn about that structure. If you only study the modern proxies for these structures ("network theory") you miss out on great stuff.

An Aesop's Fable from 2000+ years ago about influence in a network:

"A trumpeter being taken prisoner in a battle, begged hard for quarter. "Spare me, good sirs, I beseech you," said he, "and put me not to death without cause, for I have killed no one myself, nor have I any arms but this trumpet only." "For that very reason," said they who had seized him, "shall you the sooner die, for without the spirit to fight, yourself, you stir up others to warfare and bloodshed."

He who incites strife is worse than he who takes part in it."

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