I know I'm not the only one who does this. You see some weird reference on reddit to an obscure idea. And you see it again on another social media platform just a few hours or days later. And then, you notice it pop up again and again in the coming months. And you get that impression, that the person referencing it subsequently, like yourself, saw the earlier reference.

But it doesn't stop there. A few weeks later a completely independent factoid pops up. Independent though it is, it's related somehow to the other. And you wait and you wait, and someone slaps them together like the world's worst "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter" Reese's Cup commercial.

Crudely and imperfectly, you're tracing these memes as they leap from brain to brain. Like an epidemiologist. You can see the outlines of the chains from person to person, even though almost certainly a link here or there is invisible to you.

Just the idea of tracing the memes gives hints at why some live and some die. Certainly ancient Hurrians, whoever in the hell they were, weren't able (for the most part) to craft memes that could survive... little of their ideas were written, and some disaster or conquest ended their civilization. Ours are likely no less ephemeral... the Carrington Event that wipes out my comment history might already be on its way. But some ideas and stories just happen to land on barren soil. The listener finds them boring. Or has many other more important stories they prefer. Or, with our disjointed way of communicating now days, the message in a bottle just winds up on a desolate shore.

What the link's author talks about is somewhat different, I think. He wonders why the crows that collect shiny baubles prefers one shiny rock over another. It's a fashion thing. This story or that idea seems "cooler", it coheres well with the listener's personality, or makes them stand out when they're trying to woo the opposite sex.