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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

There is nothing inherently blind about following because there is normally multiple examples to chose from. Picking a stream of someone studying among all the other possible streams is very much a choice even if that choice provides some validation.

In aggregate culture is a back and forth of people pushing in new directions or independently discovering existing ones and others following their lead, but it’s the followers who determine what’s normal more than the pioneers.

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Followers do not determine what's normal, they only do what they consider is already normal. And pioneers do what they care about regardless of whether it is 'normal'.

If only 1 person does something it’s not normal. Hell if 1,000 or even 100,000 people on the planet do something it’s still not nominal but the vast majority of that first 1,000 let alone everyone after that going to be followers.

Put another way the first person to ever make pizza didn’t suddenly transform it into a cultural phenomenon. It was enough people copying the idea that transformed the initial concept into one of the most popular types of food.

There's another group in between pioneers and followers, the people who are willing to follow things that haven't gained traction yet.

That group plus pioneers are most important to entering the mass market of followers.

The group you’re describing are still as you just said following someone else.

But even if you add a new group of early followers it also works in the other direction. Stuff most people do also stops being popular because of what the largest groups of follower’s decides to stop doing.

The largest group of followers "deciding" to "stop doing" something, is something that never happens automatically, they are always influenced by a pioneer.

The question is which pioneer, there isn’t just a single person bucking any given trend.

Didn't claim there was a single pioneer bucking any given trend, I used plural in my previous replies to refer to pioneers as a whole.

That’s not what I meant. I mean do people stop on day 1 with the 57th pioneer, or day 20,037 with the 847,529th pioneer, or keep going? That’s a choice and individual followers don’t make the same choice.

That's a choice individual followers have little say in, since they merely follow and have no say/influence on the followers as a whole.

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