Adoption, influence, and the value of a growing networkUpdated 25 October 2026

Open the notebook
Virality Research
A public learning project

What makes information, ideas, behaviours, culture, and products spread?

One node starts the cascade.It travels through ties and across groups.
Origin

A familiar mystery, examined carefully.

I build products and write online. Like most people who make things, I hope the work will occasionally reach the people it is for. Usually it doesn’t travel very far.

Once a LinkedIn post of mine reached roughly 200,000 views. I still couldn’t say exactly why. At first, I thought the answer was simply algorithmic opacity.

But I started noticing that some songs, games, phrases, and stories had travelled between childhoods and communities long before digital feeds existed, while others didn’t. That suggests there may be fundamentals to virality beyond channel-specific nuances.

I’m going to read books and research papers on this topic and see if I can find them.

From the desk

Recently on the desk.

Cover of Diffusion of Innovations, Fifth Edition by Everett M. Rogers

Source #011 · Chapter 6 reviewed

Diffusion of InnovationsFifth edition

Everett M. Rogers · 2003 · Book

The latest reading looks at perceived product advantage, fit, trial, and visible results, alongside selected chapters from Andrew Chen’s The Cold Start Problem.

Read the source
Latest notePractitioner frameworkS101 · The Cold Start Problem

A useful tool does not automatically become a useful network.

Chen proposes that standalone utility can support a product before its network forms. He also warns that tool users may never make the transition: sharing or collaboration needs a close connection to the original task. This is a practitioner hypothesis illustrated by company cases, not a measured causal effect.

Open the note pile
Project status

My flow from mapping the ecosystem to reading all the shortlisted sources and beyond.

Research flow
Selected stage / Current

Turn the reading into a record that can be questioned.

Each source is extracted once, mapped into its relevant sections, and checked before it can inform the wider analysis.

34 / 43
essential sources entered; 3 await OCR
215
source-level evidence cards reviewed
9
essential sources still to enter
The inquiry

Four questions hold the work together.

01

Why do people voluntarily pass some information along?

02

How does an idea move between social groups?

03

Is adopting a product different from sharing a story?

04

Where do people end and algorithms begin?

Explore the current questions
Take part

Help make the inquiry better.

01

Share an observation or question

Tell me about something you have seen travel through a community, childhood, product, or feed.

Share thoughtfully