The obvious connection to HN is that people read and upvote the popular articles, so there's (probably) a lot more randomness and a lot less meritocracy in what makes it to the front page than people suspect. This matches my experience, where one of my blog posts will sink without a trace on HN, and then be hugely popular after someone resubmits it later.
It would be very interesting to do a "cumulative advantage" study on HN: split the users into sub-groups, and see if there's any correlation between the popular articles across sites.
I suspect there's also a "cumulative advantage" effect on comments, with popular members getting way more upvotes. Some high-karma member could quantify this by posting half their comments from a new account and A/B testing.
link to more on the music experiment: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.h...
Perhaps a more apt comparison would be how certain blogs (37signals, marco.org, Svbtle, etc) rocket to the front page based off of their TLD alone. I don't think this is a particularly bad thing -- this is how branding works, after all -- but I would definitely be interested to see an experiment that throws everything on Readability and hides the URL to see if things change.
I suspect there's also a "cumulative advantage" effect on comments, with popular members getting way more upvotes. Some high-karma member could quantify this by posting half their comments from a new account and A/B testing.
I could be incorrect, but I recall reading that part of the ranking algorithm is based on the commenter's average karma.
If you actually would read free market economomics, for example market process theory. You would learn that actually free market economists do not belive that the market is this always stable thing that is pareto optimal.
It is actually discribed much more as a lagging, thing where there are forces pushing the markets in the right direction in the longer run.
Also if you for example look at public choice theory, that is economic analysis to democracy, you will see that just because the market is not stable does not mean you want the state to stabalize it. The state faces insentives that make unlikly to do the right thing, even if we know what that right thing is. There you have to problem that you often get unintended consequences, that is even if you assume that the state is all nice and only wants to help you, there is still a question if the have the knowlage and forsight to actually implment things correctly. So in the end it makes it very lickly that the intervention actually has negative consequences instead of positive ones.
So, next time please inform yourself befor attacking a groupe of on the basis of what you think they belive.
tl:dr; free market econmists are not as dumb as you think they are, they actually have spend the last 150 years thinking about these problems.
edit: I'd venture to say anything longer than 5-10 years could be considered long term for this question. Under that measure, I'd say government spending has exhibited positive-feedback behavior over the last 50+ years. Anything else?
You could probably extend this theory of what makes things successful to a lot of other domains (music, books, fashion, ideas, memes, startups, people...)
However, it's possible the ratio of intrinsic qualities vs extrinsic luck varies or is not 50/50 in all domains.
With music (or books) you have to invest a few minutes or a few hours to really evaluate if you like something, so those factors may affect how much extrinsic "cumulative advatage" snowball effects count vs intrinsic quality.
I'd really like to see more empirical research of how success by "luck vs skill" actually plays out in other categories. Any one know of follow up work to that 2007 study?
As it happens, my wife is a HN member but has not found it easy to get traction for stories she submits. On a couple of occasions I have re-submitted an article that I thought was unfairly overlooked and it has attracted replies and karma in abundance. Anecdata to be sure, but based on this and other observations in HN and other online communities I think your hunch is likely correct.
If anyone feels like exploring this in R or somesuch, MetaFilter (where upvotes by other members are public) makes a large amount of its user pattern data available for analysis: http://stuff.metafilter.com/infodump/
So it's more or less this: "rate this song" is different from "do you like this song that other people thought it was good as well?"
Maybe for HN you can randomize the order on the front page and hide the score
"King did say that he thought he was outed too early to obtain any conclusive results from the experiment..."
But there’s a catch: Until the news leaked about the author’s real identity,
this critically acclaimed book had sold somewhere between 500 and 1,500 copies,
depending on which report you read.
Let's say, I decide to write a book and a publisher buys it. It sells 1K copies. What are the chances this book will be reviewed by influential critics? Intuitively, I'd say close to zero. Doesn't this suggest she was throwing some weight behind the publication, albeit maybe anonymously and through her publisher or agent?
Off the top of my head, in the book world, Stephen King is one of those people with that type of fanbase. I think a lot of people agree that he's a fine writer but there's a lot of junk mixed in with his good stuff - yet even the junk still rockets up the best seller list just because[1]. Stephanie Meyer can do this as well, and critics have said she's not a very good writer at all (ironically Stephen King said this too).
My whole point (though admittedly tangential to the issue at hand which I already indicated I find plausible) is that it doesn't look to me like the mentioned critical acclaim could have come from nowhere - if the book doesn't sell at least a few copies it seems unlikely it would be reviewed at all, much less by prestigious critics.
Not just critics. :)
So while it is hard for a new author to get reviewed by influential reviewers before there are sales figures, it is also the case that there are many such reviews.
I also liked Ender's game.
Roughly same genre, I don't know. Ordinarily I am not even into magic, but the odd fantasy book sticks.
If she really wanted to stay anonymous, she would have chosen a different publisher, publicist, agent, etc.
At least one editor has already admitted to passing on the book, not knowing Rowling wrote it, so she went through the "normal" means of querying under the pen name, not saying "I'm JK Rowling, and I want to publish under a pseudonym"
I will say though, it will look fishier if the Lawyer who leaked the information isn't reprimanded or fired, since he broke client confidentiality.
If she openly released the book with her name attached, it would instantly be compared to her past successes and receive false praise or scrutiny based on her achievements as a fantasy writer.
It is a liberating experience when one finally realises that the world truly is a random place, and that a great many things that occur in one's life are not in fact a product of one's own actions, but rather those of extraneous conditions that are forced upon us.
It's also incredibly depressing.
To randomness.
Wealth is dominated by inheritance and outliers, so this is less surprising than it first appears.
I wouldn't be surprised, because nobody gives you money because you are smart. You have to make a sustained, focused effort to create things of value in order to obtain wealth.
Intelligence without drive is like a car with a powerful engine but no wheels. One of the smartest guys I've known worked as a janitor and never had any money - while being smart, he just never stuck with something long enough to make it pay off.
Well, this also implies that none of our actions have any foreseeable outcome. And since we're defined by our own actions, that means we have no means to define ourselves. And that's a scary proposition.
"July 7, 2013 By Karen This book is so well written that I suspect that some years down the road we will hear the author's name is a pseudonym of some famous writer. "
(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316206849/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...)
(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cuckoos-Calling-Cormoran-Strike/dp/1...)
Success certainly has an element of luck as well as initial advantages (rich parents, living in the right country ...). but I don't think that success can be maintained without ability, talent and hard work. So for Jobs, Dylan and Rowling, their first break may have been a fluke, (albeit one attained by hard work and persistence), but their continued success was due to talent rather than to some winner takes all effect.
As regularly and repeatedly demonstrated by the phenomenon of "one-hit-wonders".
The suggestion that the quality of my work might not contribute to my own success as much as I'd hope is disheartening.
I also wonder: how can I build up my own cumulative advantage?
In other words, be relentless. Self-advertise, stay on top of things, keep pushing ahead.
But that momentum will never build unless you keep firing pellets, so to speak.
You find a piece of software that does what you need. You check the feature spec, the price, the About page and then you hit Support Forums only to see a dozen of threads, latest being from two weeks ago. And then you leave, because who wants a stale piece of software that nobody wants.
The take away is to hide any sort of activity/sales indicators from the website until you get proper traction and hit the critical mass. Low numbers make more damage than they do good.
There's a big, big difference between choosing software and choosing a fiction book which makes popularity much more important for software: New versions. Fiction books almost never get any sort of new version. There are no updates to fiction books. Software nearly always is updated, and updated many times. We even have multi-level version numbers (1.2.4) for all the different types of software updates.
Software is updated to fix it and to make it better. Software that's not updated means a bug you find now will stay broken. The amount of activity can (in same cases) be a proxy for how much effort the developer is going to put in. Too little activity and it's possible the software will be abandoned. Software not used much is software is software that will probably have bugs that remain broken.
A better analogy would be starting to watch an unpopular TV show with long story arcs. If it's unpopular, it's likely to be cancelled, which means you won't find out the ending.
So if you have 10 hipsters out of 30,000 as opposed to 9, there is a better chance that the songs that make it up to the top of the charts are wildly different. This does not constitute randomness. Having more people who appreciate one sound as opposed to another will give you a different result, and quite predictable. Unless of course the randomness is with the number of hipsters you are likely to get per sampling of population.
If J.K. Rowling can't sell more than a couple thousand copies of a new book based on it's quality alone, what makes you think you're going to sell any more by going the traditional publisher route under an also-unknown name.
It all comes down to marketing your book. You'll have to do your own marketing with traditional publishing as well, except now you also are in a contract. If your book does badly, your advance will make up for it. If it does well, then you're limited by paying back the advance prior to royalties, and you lose a touch of control.
Anyways, it gives me faith in our self-publishing business and our answers to clients who wonder why they haven't sold 3,000 copies yet. Although our last one is over 10k sales, mostly because they had been marketing the book months in advance of even writing it, and it was the written form of the advice they had been giving for years and building a platform with.
That's what we can learn from this. Build a platform based on you, market the book before it's even been written, build anticipation, and then market even more. I've really enjoyed this "revelation" about J.K., even if I'm not a reader. True, it does have a slightly sour taste due to it being a somewhat PR move, but then again... even Issac Asimov was Paul French when he wanted to write something my 8-year old sister would (and has!) read.
You can experience this here on HN or on reddit. My experience is that a good quality insight of mine will almost always get a few upvotes. But when there's wild success (like 1500 votes), it's entirely because of the circumstance. That is, there's a fantastic need for that comment, but almost any good comment could fulfil it.
Harry Potter is a good story, and good stories are good. That's about it. Oh, it's kinda nice to have common ground to relate to others with, and to use as a framework or reference point for discussion - like Moby Dick, Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz. Are they great stories? They are good stories, that everyone knows. (though I really like the cinematography in Star Wars).
More people should read "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman; it really breaks down how this and many similar biases work and gives suggestions on how to overcome them (althought he's brutally honest in saying that we'll probably keep being tricked by them anyway).
I think that present 48 ordinary songs to 8 sets of ordinary people leads to wild fluctuations because it's an artificial setup.
As someone who discovers unknown music regularily without social recommendations: not all music is created equal, there is no "just music" that is listened to by "just people". Music is a result of coevolution of tastes and styles. If you give some random un-self-selecting people some random non-hit songs, they would most likely give on at all.