Guy #3 | Hacker News Reader

Guy #3

sethgodin.typepad.com

63 pointsciscoriordan27 comments

Squinting too hard to find wisdom where none exist, aren't we?

That movement formed because the spectators could see and observe each other. As the first few individuals joined in to participate, it gave social proof and acceptance to the act.

:-)

Yes, if you're looking for insight into the growth of online movements, let me just leave you with this: online, only the vocal participants and spectators are visible. One detractor can negate a thousand, happy silent participants.

P.S. Godin's take on it is orthogonal to the interpretation of the video in the earlier mention of it here. The first time, it was about the growth of social networks; everyone was a participant in Guy #1's "network". Godin calls out "Guy #3" and frames him not as a participant in a social network, but as competitor to the founder, Guy #1. (this could really get meta, but I hope someone is getting what I am saying.)

Godin was probably drawing an allusion to Guy#3 being the "tipping point" of people to join.

As far as detractors...somebody could have just as easily poked fun at Guy#1 (mock dancing, throw a soft object at him, etc.), thus invalidating his own self-absorbed ecstasy, and probably making it more difficult for the observers to be converted into participants (not to mention detracting from the overall mood of the purpose of the festival).

I think a more reasonable explanation for how participation precipitated would be to look at it from the perspective of influence and the time for that influence to propagate throughout the crowd. Guy#1 takes a few minutes to influence Guy#2 to join. The two dancing together takes less time to influence Guy#3, and then the three of them take VERY little time to attract a small group, and then the whole festival jumps in...

I think that there is some value in calculating the time it takes for the group to go from one participant to many participants to see if there is an exponential growth rate taking place.

That might take the effort out of squinting too hard.

;)

I think that there is some value in calculating the time it takes for the group to go from one participant to many participants to see if there is an exponential growth rate taking place.

It's midnight and well, I decided to do just this at 5 second intervals and then count the number of people dancing (and also flocking too the party, ie in the frame), just to get a rough idea.

  0 seconds   - 1
  5 seconds   - 1
  10 seconds  - 1
  15 seconds  - 1
  20 seconds  - 2
  25 seconds  - 2
  30 seconds  - 2
  35 seconds  - 2
  40 seconds  - 2
  45 seconds  - 2
  50 seconds  - 2
  55 seconds  - 3
  60 seconds  - 3
  65 seconds  - 3
  70 seconds  - 3
  75 seconds  - 7
  80 seconds  - 11
  85 seconds  - 17
  90 seconds  - 21
  95 seconds  - 26
  100 seconds - 35
  105 seconds - 46
  110 seconds - 59

At this point, it became too difficult to count the number of people joining it every frame, but the data seems to indicate exponential growth.

(I'm also assuming Guy #1 was dancing for some time on his own before the person with the camera decided to film it, so this would show the exponential growth more)

http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~humphrys/Notes/Neural/Bitmaps/s...

I usually hate replying to myself, but I just came across a longer video of the same guy and with a low view count and a different angle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU7dxkIz1Vs

It seems that Guy #1 had been dancing for awhile before it really caught on.

I'd say it was a girl who moved closer to the dancing guys just after guy #3 showed up.

I thought so too at first, but if you look closely it looks like they have a beard? (1:03)

There is an implicit message in there -- love what you do -- that I didn't see mentioned here (or in the earlier post of this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=644796). That guy is not dancing to attract a crowd, he is having a great time and others wanted to join in.

I think the other message may be that once the crowds start flocking over, something has been lost. The majority of the crowd is there just to copy other people... Lots of parallels to online communities + keeping the magic.

I'd also add the corollary: A lack of social interest/acceptance is not a meaningful critique of whatever you're doing. Dancing guy was not -wrong- or -weird- to dance; even though he was alone and the recording was likely started to make fun of him.

The vast majority of the crowd showed up simply because they saw a crowd forming.

I used to go to shows, and there was always a Dancing Hippie Guy in the corner, doing his Hippie Dance, no matter what show it was. Voodoo Glowskulls whipping out a driven punk beat? Hippie Dance. Cherry Poppin' Daddies playing some swing-ish tune? Hippie Dance. Fishbone doing ska? Hippie Dance. Los Fabulosos Cadillacs with some latin-flavored rock? Hippie Dance!

I never noticed this before, but at the very end there's a girl off-camera saying, "How did he do that?"

Like you implied, he didn't say "I'm going to start a dance party today"—just doing something in a certain social environment was all that was necessary...

The human mind is a weird thing. Get a bunch of them together and it's even weirder.

How do you know he wasn't a shill planted in the audience by the festival's promoters?

</devil's_advocate>

I'd argue it was guy #4 and guy #5 because they came together and therefore were officially not weirdos.

Guy #1.

Definitely ;-)

I'd argue guy #2.

Once you add the second guy in, it becomes social.

When you add in guy #3, that's when the exponential growth happens and you achieve virality, but without guy #2 it would just be guy #1 still doing his own thing.

If we were taking this into online traffic terms I would say guy #1 is the founders, guy #2 is initial traffic that comes from advertising and being mentioned elsewhere, guy #3 are referrals from guy #2 and is the real organic growth.

While guy #3's are important for organic growth, its the guy #2's that validate guy #1. Without guy #2's hanging around, guy #3 wouln't have joined in.

So guy #2's are really the pivotal point. Like PG would say, find users that are really passionate about your product.

Having just seen the longer video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU7dxkIz1Vs), definitely guy #2 from the video Seth linked.

Guys were coming and going, but he was the one that stuck around and with such passion to get guy #3 to jump in.

Instead of copying/directly interacting with Guy #1, he instead made the idea of "Dancing on the hill" his own. That's when Guy #3 joins in, because he makes the dance his own aswell.

Perhaps there's a thought in there, about giving people the freedom to make something their own.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=644796

The entire dance party constituted a tiny minority of the people within eyesight---there were literally thousands of people on that hill who could see him. There were a bunch of people already dancing closer to the stage and all over the hill. The reason anyone started filming him in the first place was because they were laughing at the funny drunk/high guy.

As jnorthop's theory that "he was not dancing to attract a crowd"... yes he was. Seth's particular version of the video starts just after he desperately implores some nearby people to get up and dance with him. Evidence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frd0CPYuZgU

Interpret that ;P

There's a difference between dancing to be seen, and just wanting to dance with other people for fun.

Here here[1] !!!

As what Seth would term the No. 1, I have found it hard to find #2 and #3.

People with skills have good jobs and responsibilities. Enticing them to believe in working for a startup is very difficult.

One key step is they can see themselves being that exciting #2 and #3 and bring the crowd to start dancing [as such]

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[1] See poll for comment on Raver himself : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=650958

There is a Russian proverb that roughly translates: "Will you please be our Guy #3?"

> — Третим будешь?

I'm once again struck by how poorly the steepness of a grassy hill is conveyed by 2 dimensional images.

Something about that video appears staged to me.

I think Guy #3 is MORE of a leader thn Guy #1... Guy #1 is absolutely the 'out of the box' thinker BUT Guy #3 is more rational, sees an opportunity, and is probably the first to really give 'credibility' to the movement.

Guy #2 is a wannabe.

Or maybe they all just wanted to dance and the genuine heartfelt lack of agenda is what brought about the success? :)

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