Vincent Forrest was working his way through college in the inauspicious year of 2008 and, like so many young people from his recession-bitten generation, found himself at an uninspiring job in an independent gift shop in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Business was slow, and Forrest, an amateur cartoonist, passed his time by flipping through the pages of greeting card catalogs. He would rewrite the cards’ punch lines with his sense of humor—weird, detached, and pithy—and pass them around the office.
This was basically a game for bored clerks, not a bid for stardom. But occasionally boredom is a cavity where creativity breeds. Forrest’s colleagues were delighted by his hobby and insisted he had an uncommon talent. So in May 2009 he opened a shop on Etsy, an online marketplace for independent artists, to sell pin buttons with his jokes. His first eighteen designs found a small audience. He kept writing. He shared jokes with his close friends to get feedback and printed their favorites. He experimented with political jokes (which buyers often ignored), pop culture jokes (which they liked), and goofy grammar jokes (which they loved). He kept learning, tweaking, printing.
Forrest’s pinback button shop currently has more than five hundred designs and more than one hundred thousand sales. Between 2011 and 2014, he held the site record for the most items sold in Etsy’s Handmade department, and his store remains among the the most popular in the site’s history.
The success of somebody like Vincent Forrest interested me for two reasons. First, he’s a little voice without a megaphone. In the previous chapter, we saw that when researchers studied the evolution of massive hits online, the most dependable path to success relied on one-to-one-million blasts rather than what you’d typically call a “viral” hit. But people like Forrest don’t have access to the marketing muscle of a company like Random House. They might never achieve literal virality, but to get started they need to build their own broadcast. That typically means they have to make something worth sharing.
Starting from such a small base of exposure, Forrest’s early success relied on networks of people he didn’t know and whom he would never meet. He needed these strangers to adore his jokes and to pass them along. That’s the second reason why Forrest’s story interests me: It’s not a story about buttons. It’s a story about why people like to share private things like inside jokes.
“The nature of the in-joke is that it creates an opportunity for people to get to know each other,” Forrest told me. “If a button says, ‘I like reading,’ there’s no conversation there. Plenty of people like reading. But a specific Jane Eyre joke is only going to go noticed by a smaller number of people who love Jane Eyre and can genuinely connect over something.” The smaller, densely connected audience beats the larger, diffuse group.
The first half of this book focused on a simple question: Why do individuals like what they like? But the last few chapters have shown that this question alone is insufficient. People don’t make decisions individually. They aren’t just creatures of influence (“I bought it because it’s popular”). They’re also creatures of self-expression (“I bought it because it’s me”). People purchase and share all sorts of things because they want people to see that they have them. Vincent Forrest sells buttons to be worn in public. He sells 1.25-inch baubles of identity.
When somebody posts an article online, people often say the article is “shared.” Shared is an interesting usage, because in the physical world you tend to share things that are excludable. When you share a blanket, there is less to keep you warm. When you share a dozen cookies, you eat fewer than twelve. But information is different. Information is a nonexcludable resource. When you share something online, you are giving up nothing. In fact, you are gaining something quite valuable: an audience. Sharing, in the context of information, isn’t really sharing. It’s much more like talking.
So when somebody shares information—like an article, a joke, or a button—are they doing something for other people, or are they just talking about themselves?
• • •
Vincent Forrest was born, raised, and educated in Grand Rapids. In high school, he was a jokester with a sketchbook and a fondness for testing the limits of humorous propriety. “I’ve always liked to try out jokes, and I’ve found that I’m as weird as other people let me be,” he said. “If you laugh, my feeling is, that’s the new zero, and I’ll keep moving forward. If you don’t laugh, I’ll see that’s the edge and I’ll pull back.”
When he graduated from high school, Forrest spent several years at community college before enrolling in Grand Valley State, just down Lake Michigan Drive, to study art. After moving out of his parents’ house, he worked at the boutique gift shop to make rent, but the combination of a forty-hour week and intensive studio classes were punishing. “I developed terrible insomnia,” he said. “I’d have anxiety nightmares, but those were okay because at least the nightmares told me I had fallen asleep.” Forrest switched majors after one semester, to English.
At the gift shop, Forrest rewrote the jokes in card catalogs as a way to daydream through the drudgery of a cashier’s job. But in 2009 a confluence of unconnected events gave him the confidence to sell his jokes for money. A tax rebate from the federal government was just enough to spend on a button-making machine. He opened an Etsy shop and used the pen name Beanforest. “At first, it was just throwing weird stuff into the void,” he said. “Some of the jokes didn’t work. But the ones that did were selling. People were sharing the jokes on Facebook and tagging their friends.” Just as sales were growing, he and his girlfriend broke up, and Forrest seized the moment to take a big risk. In July 2009, he quit his job to go full-time with buttons.
Many of Forrest’s jokes aim for a peculiar niche: introverts with a nerdy streak, who are as likely to quote a new Internet meme as Shakespeare’s Othello or Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Within two years, Forrest’s site became the top-selling handmade shop on Etsy. Some of his all-time most popular buttons include:
“I’ve never been of the opinion that I should write for as big a crowd as possible,” Forrest said. “I want to write for people with narrow interests that they’re passionate about. I’m essentially writing inside jokes that create a magnet of understanding.”
I asked Forrest whether he had a personal philosophy of why some jokes just work. He told me he might, but he’d have to put the answer in writing. Several days later, at 8:34 in the morning, I got an e-mail from him that began: “The sun is up and I’ve spent the last 5.5 hours working on these questions.”
The e-mail was more than one thousand words long, and he assured me that many paragraphs of half-finished thoughts had been culled in the process. It was either ironic or perfectly fitting that somebody who wrote 1.25-inch sentiments for a living struggled to explain what he had learned from several years of those sentiments and their accumulating yards.
I read the e-mail several times over. It was perfect, a Cracker Jack box of insights into ideas that I turned around in my head in the first chapters of this book, like the dance between surprise and familiarity and the power of poetic concision.
Here is Forrest on how to be interesting in 1.25 inches. It beautifully summarizes the aesthetic aha, the tension between uniqueness and relatability, which is ultimately about creating a new kernel of meaning for people.
The size of a pinback button limits how much can be said while still being readable . . . When I’m doing my job well, I’m saying something precise about topics that are personal to me or those I’m close to (whether that’s education, existential panic, or my pets, etc.) in a way that is specific enough that it feels personal and relatable to others with the same interests . . . Success is in making a meaningful connection with my audience.
On where meaning comes from:
Specificity and familiarity matter. Detail can make the difference between something that feels like it comes from experience (and meaningful) versus something general and passive. I want to be educated enough on a subject to feel like I have something real or new to say. Customers have requested designs for a wide range of subjects, but even if I like the topic, there are a lot of clever people out there and most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Chances are decent that even if a joke feels new to me, it’s played out to the audience most likely to buy it. Knowledge and personal interest don’t guarantee that everything I do is new, but it significantly reduces the risk of retreading old material.
On the chaos of hits:
It feels almost impossible to tell what people will respond to. I’ve written a fair amount of hits and at least as many misses, and in most cases it’d be difficult for me to explain why one goes on to be a bestseller and the other a complete failure.
But Forrest’s most interesting observation to me was about why he thought people bought his buttons. “The best jokes are so specific that they feel private,” he told me. “It’s that surprise, I think, that people like—that I shared something that felt almost too small and personal for anybody else to know.” Later in his e-mail Forrest said that his jokes served as “a small way to communicate kinship.”
Forrest says that people buy his buttons because his jokes are so specific that they feel private. Then he says that people buy his buttons to communicate with their friends. These interpretations initially seem contradictory. Why would you buy something private for the purpose of sharing it?
But perhaps that’s just it: An inside joke is a private network of understanding. It crystallizes an in-group, a kind of soft cult, where unique individuals feel like they belong. Vincent Forrest’s physical products are buttons and magnets. But what he’s really selling is something else: a sentiment that feels so personal that you simply have to talk about it.
• • •
Every time you pass along a piece of information in a social network—online or offline—its ultimate popularity depends on whether your audience decides to tell other people, their audience, about it. You face a simple question: “Is this news right for my audience?” Then your audience applies the same calculation to determine if they should pass it along to their friends: “Is this right for my audience?” And their audience, the audience of your audience, makes the same judgment before telling an entirely separate group of people: “Is this right for my audience?” With each step, the news travels further from its original source.
“To make popular content, it’s not enough to know your friends or your followers,” said Jure Leskovec, a computer scientist who studies online behavior at Stanford University. “It’s about knowing the friends of your friends and the followers of your followers. For something to go big, it has to be interesting to those beyond your immediate audience—the audience of your audience.”
If we share information with the people we’re connected to, another way to ask the question, Why do people share what they share? is to ask, What connects people?
Among the most established and consistent principles in the organization of humans is an idea called “homophily.” It’s a funny-looking word that communicates a simple idea: You are like the people around you—your friends, your spouse, your online networks, and your office relationships. There is a related idea, “propinquity,” which says you are fond of, and become similar to, the people you see many times, often because they live or work nearby. Together, they are like the social dimensions of fluency and the mere exposure effect. We’ve seen how individuals gravitate toward the familiar and become products of their environment. Groups of people are the same way. It’s exhausting to have to constantly explain oneself and face confrontation. It is deep and lovely to be near people who seem to understand us.
On the surface, homophily seems so self-evident as to be mundane. It’s only natural that San Francisco engineers like the company of other San Francisco engineers, or that young Catholic moms feel a kinship with other young Catholic moms. Much of the research on homophily seems to uncover pure common sense. For example, a 2011 survey of seven thousand English teenagers between fifteen and seventeen found that “academic achievement” formed a key bond in many high school friendships. Well, naturally: You don’t need a sociologist to tell you that nerds hang out with nerds.
But the implications of homophily are not simple or harmless. It can be a force behind racial segregation or bigotry. Kids who grow up in more ethnically diverse neighborhoods and schools may have more ethnic diversity in their friendships. But broadly speaking, the racial homogeneity of social groups is shocking. The average white American has ninety-one white friends for every black, Asian, or Hispanic friend. The average black American has ten black friends for each white friend. Perhaps the most stunning statistic of interracial friendships is this: In the United States, where the majority of three-year-olds are not white, up to 75 percent of white people cannot name a single “minority” friend.
A child’s first social group is profoundly shaped by his or her first neighborhood—something an infant cannot possibly control. The power of geography returns with a vengeance in parenthood. The parents of students often become close friends with each other, and these social groups can be deeply homophilic as well. Many elementary schools are heavily sorted by geography (which reflects similar income and demography) and the children’s abilities (which reflect, to a certain extent, the parents’ genes, values, and socioeconomic status). Geography and schools shape parents’ social networks, three or four decades after geography and schools shaped their first social network as children themselves.
The fact that people want to belong to like-minded flocks can be scary when the group is a few standard deviations from the cultural median. In 1984, the British sociologist Eileen Barker published The Making of a Moonie, a seven-year investigation of the Unification Church based on interviews with members of one of America’s most popular cults. While many cults are seen as preying on poor and uneducated people from broken homes, Barker discovered that Moonies tended to be middle class with college degrees and stable families. Outsiders were sure that Moonies were victims of sleep deprivation, trances, and other trickery. Perhaps they wanted to believe that only advanced brainwashing could transform somebody into a Moonie. Instead the cult inculcated new members through more innocent techniques: weekend retreats, long conversations, shared meals, and an environment of love and support. Outsiders did not want to contemplate the idea that ordinary people like them might enjoy the comfort of a cult.45 The truth was perhaps more frightening: Moonie participants were free to leave (many left within a week) and those who stayed simply felt at home.
One of the hallmarks of a cult is that members unite to oppose what they see as an oppressive or illegitimate mainstream culture. But if you recall from an earlier chapter, rejecting an illegitimate norm is precisely the sociological definition of being “cool.” So what’s the difference between what people consider “cultish” versus “cool”? Both groups self-organize around the idea that the world doesn’t get them. Both develop customs that belong to them exclusively. Perhaps a cult is an extreme version of homophily. But in a way, every social network is a soft cult—a place where people can, ironically, feel like individuals by belonging to a group.
There are hundreds of BuzzFeed articles about introverts, including but not limited to: “31 Unmistakable Signs That You’re an Introvert,” “23 Things All Introverts Are Guilty of Doing,” “21 Insanely Useful Skills Every Introvert Has Mastered,” “15 Things Introverts Should Know About Planning a Wedding,” and “11 Talents Introverts Don’t Realize They Have.” Why would a media company exquisitely attuned to publishing “shareable” content want to write so much about people who theoretically keep to themselves? It’s not just that introverts, like all people, love reading about themselves on the Internet. It’s also the case that introverts, like all people, love sharing within their clique evidence that they are distinct from the mainstream. The truth is that everybody is a little bit introverted. But “14 Ways That You Are Probably Just As Introverted As the Median Person” doesn’t make anybody feel special or different.
Stanford’s Leskovec says there are two basic feedback loops in every social circle. First, people seek out others who are like them. Sociologists call this “sorting.” Second, individuals change to become more like the group around them. This is called “socializing.” These sorting and socializing effects are most commonly studied in cities. But the Internet, too, is a universal metropolis, a mosaic of neighborhoods, many of which are deeply segregated or, at least, trafficked by like-minded users. There are corners of the Internet visited almost entirely by white people or black people, white nationalists or feminists, bicoastal media gabbers or Wisconsin Packers fans.
Here’s a brief explanation of how sorting and socializing might work on the social network Twitter. Let’s say I post an article on Twitter about Chinese history. Thousands of people see it. Some of them aren’t interested in Chinese history, and they might leave my network by “unfollowing” me. But some of them enjoy Chinese history and pass the article through their networks by “retweeting” it. Occasionally, people who see this retweet—the audience of my audience—might join my network.
This is a very simple model of information traveling around the Internet, but it has two important implications. First, social networks often sort themselves by bringing like-minded people together. They evolve toward homophily. Second, growing my popularity on a social network like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram is about appealing not only to my audience, but also to the audience of my audience.
Another interesting thing happens on these digital social networks. Over time, I learn which kinds of messages get the most attention. I adopt the ideas and writing styles that are most successful for getting positive feedback, such as retweets or followers. I learn that posting dramatic charts or funny pictures is good and giving people smart reasons to believe what they already think is great. I learn that too much cynicism about certain celebrities is unwelcome, and my personal feelings about Coldplay are unpopular, and using ALL CAPS TO MAKE A SINCERE POLITICAL POINT is awkwardly effortful. As if by osmosis, the patois of the network becomes my own.
In short, similarity in social networks goes both ways. My network looks more like me and I look more like my network.
Vincent Forrest intuitively understands both sides of this convergence. His best buttons are, by his own admission, the ones that draw the tightest circle. People want to share the messages that strike them as the most personal. But he’s also learned from his audience. He discovered that Etsy buyers like arch pop culture references and unabashedly nerdy grammar jokes. So over time, he made more buttons blending pop culture with jokes about reading and syntax. He built his own social network with tens of thousands of buyers, but, ironically, he did it not by writing jokes for all ten thousand people at once, but by writing jokes for just a few of them at a time.
• • •
The most popular mobile apps in the world are various shades of self-expression. The most downloaded nongaming apps in iPhone history are Facebook, Facebook Messenger, YouTube, Instagram, Skype, WhatsApp, Find My iPhone, Google Maps, Twitter, and iTunes U. In other words: maps, videos, and a whole lot of talking. If you think the download counts are skewed, try the independent surveys. According to a 2014 Niche study, the most common mobile uses for teenagers are texting, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Pandora, Twitter, and phone calls. Six of the eight (texting, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and the old-fashioned telephone) are just different tools for self-expression—visual, textual, and voice.
These social networks really work only when they’re big.46 There is an idea called Metcalfe’s law, which says that the value of a network is proportional to the number of its users squared. Consider, for example, a dating app. With five users, it’s worthless. Even with a hundred users, it’s not quite alluring. But with 10,000 users within a one-mile radius, it’s pretty easy to persuade user 10,001 to join the app. Getting one marginal user is easier when the social network has already reached this critical mass. But if you need thousands of people to sign up for a product before it’s useful to any one participant, how do you lure User Number One?
When Tinder, the popular dating app, was just taking off, Whitney Wolfe, the company’s de facto head of outreach and marketing, faced just this problem.47 She needed many, many single people to join the dating app all at once in each city. (After all, even if she’d signed up a hundred thousand singles in California, the app would be useless for anybody in Baltimore.)
At first Wolfe’s problem seems to have nothing at all to do with Vincent Forrest’s challenge to sell inside jokes. But her solution returns us to homophily. Remember Watts’s and Leskovec’s rules for popularity: Ideas spread most reliably when they piggyback off an existing network of closely connected and interested people. In other words, if you’re trying to attract groups, find common points of origin. To build an early user base, Wolfe had to go somewhere hundreds, hopefully even thousands, of single people were already connected. So she went back to school.
Wolfe had graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, which is well known for its culture of bacchanalia. She understood what she called “the Southern college experience.” To find users, she first went to the sororities. “I’d walk into the house and I’d ask them to download Tinder as a favor to me,” she said. “I would tell them I was a young working woman who needed their support, and also, by the way, every cute guy on campus was going to join this thing in the next twenty minutes, because I was walking straight to the frat houses after I left.”
After persuading the sororities to get on the app, she would go to the fraternities. She would tell the men that she personally watched every girl in the house down the road download the app. “Do not disappoint the girls, because they’re waiting for you!” she’d say. And would you guess what the guys did? “They would immediately download the app.”
Wolfe didn’t seed the app by seeking out magically influential individuals. She did it by lassoing entire groups at once. She piggybacked on networks that already existed, popular fraternities and popular sororities that were themselves connected to other fraternities and sororities in a metacluster of Greek life at SMU.
Tinder sent Wolfe to prominent colleges around the country with the same playbook, according to Joe Munoz, who helped to build Tinder’s back-end code. “Her pitch was pretty genius,” he told Bloomberg. “She would go to chapters of her sorority, do her presentation, and have all the girls at the meetings install the app. Then she’d go to the corresponding brother fraternity—they’d open the app and see all these cute girls they knew.” There were fewer than five thousand users on Tinder before Wolfe’s cross-country jaunt. By the time she returned, there were some fifteen thousand. “The avalanche had started,” Munoz said.
Facebook’s early success followed a similar pattern. The company started in 2004 as a directory for college students at Harvard University and other selective colleges. It spread rapidly between young people who were already connected to each other by classes, dorms, and extracurricular activities. Like Tinder, its growth relied on a “bowling pin strategy,” where a product is adopted by a small niche, a densely connected network that already exists, like a bowling ball smashing into a tidy arrangement of pins. The social network wouldn’t have been useful if it found one thousand people randomly distributed around the world. But Facebook wasn’t trying to create new connections so much as it wanted to digitize—and, perhaps, deepen—the millions of student relationships that already existed.
Wolfe used the same strategy to grow Bumble, her next dating app, which had the key distinction that only women could initiate conversations. “I went back to SMU, stood on the sorority tables, and begged people to download my app,” she said. This time, she brought merchandised reinforcements—lots and lots of prizes emblazoned with the yellow Bumble logo—and she promised golden goodies for the girls who texted the most friends.
Bumble slingshot itself to growth, too, soaring to more than three million users after the first fifteen months. When I spoke with Wolfe in 2015, Bumble was still spreading through college campuses, but by her own admission, Wolfe’s shtick was already wearing thin. Sororities had become so aware that they were the gateway to college networks that they were tired of start-up founders begging them to seed a new app. “I’m a firm believer that a person can only be advertised so many times in the same format before they become cynical,” Wolfe said. “My brain is constantly looking for where you are trying to advertise to me. Visiting the sororities worked for a long time, but now I think it’s about finding the right person inside of each network who can act as my proxy.”
The most important element in a global cascade isn’t magically viral elements or mystical influencers. Rather it is about finding a group of people who are easily influenced. It turns the influencer question on its head. Don’t ask, “Who is powerful?” Instead ask, “Who is vulnerable?” In Duncan Watts’s computer models, global cascades happen when a trigger hits a densely connected audience clustered around a commonality, a soft cult. Whitney Wolfe discovered the same. “I often ask my team if they’d rather advertise on a New York City taxi or with a sticker on a backpack,” she said. “The NYC taxi cab will be seen by thousands of people, and the backpack sticker might only create curiosity among a handful.” But Wolfe, like Vincent Forrest, prefers the smaller emblem of identity, a jumping-off point for a conversation between friends. “When I’m doing my job well,” Forrest told me, “I’m saying something precise that is specific enough that it feels personal and relatable to others with the same interests.”
The world isn’t a uniformly connected glob of people. It’s still a billion clusters, cliques, and cults. What Watts sees in his models, what Wolfe sees in her apps, and what Forrest sees in his customers, is that successful creations grow most predictably when they tap into a small network of people who do not see themselves as mainstream, but rather bound by an idea or commonality that they consider special. People have all day to talk about what makes them ordinary. It turns out that they want to share what makes them weird.