Not just memes, but like pictures, or statistics or graphs? Slang and new ideas?
A lot of the most inexplicable things seem to come out nowhere to become well known, famous, and seen by millions around the world.
Any examples of exactly how and why this happens?
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Well, a lot of things go into it. *How* things get shared is explained pretty well in u/WeDriftEternal ‘s comment, but as for *why*, and what about something makes it go viral, no one knows for sure.
The computer algorithms used to serve us media that will keep us on the platform are all, for the most part, some form of AI, and thus a black box. We can’t see exactly what they prioritize over other things, so we’ll never know what *exactly* will go viral. But to get things off the ground, a small group of people need to see and share whatever it is, until you get. Generally, they share because it invokes some sort of emotion within them [1].
For the Storm Area 51 meme, that was probably a mix of humor and a little bit of fear. Enough people shared it, or it kept people paying attention to it, or whatever media algorithms were looking for, and the computers picked it up and started suggesting it to people who didn’t have it shared to them. Or, one of the “Dark broadcasters” u/WeDriftEternal mentioned found and shared it.
In the “old” days of the internet, when people had MySpaces and personal websites were way more common, there weren’t nearly as many places you could go where you would see a random post suggested to you by someone you didn’t know, at least digitally. People normally frequented a couple of their favorite sites they knew, maybe followed personal blogs of people they knew or didn’t know IRL. That’s likely why Rickrolling- which took off between 2006 and 2008- was so successful: the whole joke was that you shared it [2].
The below video does a good job of explaining some of the psychology of what sort of things we share, and how we share them. Going viral means getting shared a lot, and what exactly humans do or don’t share is really hard to pin down.
[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc)
[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickrolling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickrolling)
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