If the article is going to claim that social networks have a huge influence on the mechanics of the game of naming, they should at least seek to explain how. All I got from the text was “We tried it and it just worked”.
On the paper note. Thanks for the link, couldn’t seem to find it... I was genuinely curious about how network theory changed the results, more than “made them better”
I think if you’re funding research correctly you should be giving grant money to things that end up being a silly waste of time in retrospect.
Not that this was, necessarily, but in general giving grants to research that ends up being useless shouldn’t be considered a bad thing. It’s part of the cost of searching for new knowledge. Sometimes you’ll go down a dead end, but you still have to check there.