Essential-03 underwayUpdated 1 September 2026

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Virality Research
A public learning project

Why do some things spread?

I’m reading and learning about why some information, ideas, behaviours, culture, and products travel farther and faster than others.

Not to offer a finished formula. To make the question clearer, source by source, in public.

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Research record / 01140 catalogued sources132 reviewed evidence cards
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 reached roughly 200,000 views. I still couldn’t say exactly why. Then I started noticing how songs, games, phrases, and stories had travelled between childhoods and communities long before digital feeds existed.

That uncertainty is the starting point here: read the literature, separate what has been shown from what is only plausible, and make the learning inspectable.

Research progress

Where the project is now.

The project moves from a reading universe to verified evidence, then to cross-source synthesis. Select a stage to see what it means.

In progress

Ingestion

This is the active phase. Each source is extracted once, mapped into sections, and checked before it enters the evidence record.

Essential sources entered25 of 43

23machine-readable sources processed

2image-only sources in the OCR backlog

18essential sources yet to enter a corpus stage

132reviewed evidence cards so far

Questions being explored
  1. 01Why do people voluntarily pass some information along?
  2. 02How does an idea move between social groups?
  3. 03Is adopting a product different from sharing a story?
  4. 04Where do people end and algorithms begin?
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Methodology

How the research is done.

SourceExtracted recordEvidence checkedCompared with other sourcesPublic guidance

“Evidence reviewed” means I have checked what one source says and recorded its limits. It does not mean I have reached a final answer. For example, one experiment may show that a message makes people more willing to share it; that alone does not show it will lead to product adoption.

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Take part

Help make the inquiry better.

Share an observation or question

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

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