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Comment by mahmud | Hacker News Reader

Squinting too hard to find wisdom where none exist, aren't we?

That movement formed because the spectators could see and observe each other. As the first few individuals joined in to participate, it gave social proof and acceptance to the act.

:-)

Yes, if you're looking for insight into the growth of online movements, let me just leave you with this: online, only the vocal participants and spectators are visible. One detractor can negate a thousand, happy silent participants.

P.S. Godin's take on it is orthogonal to the interpretation of the video in the earlier mention of it here. The first time, it was about the growth of social networks; everyone was a participant in Guy #1's "network". Godin calls out "Guy #3" and frames him not as a participant in a social network, but as competitor to the founder, Guy #1. (this could really get meta, but I hope someone is getting what I am saying.)

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Godin was probably drawing an allusion to Guy#3 being the "tipping point" of people to join.

As far as detractors...somebody could have just as easily poked fun at Guy#1 (mock dancing, throw a soft object at him, etc.), thus invalidating his own self-absorbed ecstasy, and probably making it more difficult for the observers to be converted into participants (not to mention detracting from the overall mood of the purpose of the festival).

I think a more reasonable explanation for how participation precipitated would be to look at it from the perspective of influence and the time for that influence to propagate throughout the crowd. Guy#1 takes a few minutes to influence Guy#2 to join. The two dancing together takes less time to influence Guy#3, and then the three of them take VERY little time to attract a small group, and then the whole festival jumps in...

I think that there is some value in calculating the time it takes for the group to go from one participant to many participants to see if there is an exponential growth rate taking place.

That might take the effort out of squinting too hard.

;)

I think that there is some value in calculating the time it takes for the group to go from one participant to many participants to see if there is an exponential growth rate taking place.

It's midnight and well, I decided to do just this at 5 second intervals and then count the number of people dancing (and also flocking too the party, ie in the frame), just to get a rough idea.

  0 seconds   - 1
  5 seconds   - 1
  10 seconds  - 1
  15 seconds  - 1
  20 seconds  - 2
  25 seconds  - 2
  30 seconds  - 2
  35 seconds  - 2
  40 seconds  - 2
  45 seconds  - 2
  50 seconds  - 2
  55 seconds  - 3
  60 seconds  - 3
  65 seconds  - 3
  70 seconds  - 3
  75 seconds  - 7
  80 seconds  - 11
  85 seconds  - 17
  90 seconds  - 21
  95 seconds  - 26
  100 seconds - 35
  105 seconds - 46
  110 seconds - 59

At this point, it became too difficult to count the number of people joining it every frame, but the data seems to indicate exponential growth.

(I'm also assuming Guy #1 was dancing for some time on his own before the person with the camera decided to film it, so this would show the exponential growth more)

http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~humphrys/Notes/Neural/Bitmaps/s...

I usually hate replying to myself, but I just came across a longer video of the same guy and with a low view count and a different angle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU7dxkIz1Vs

It seems that Guy #1 had been dancing for awhile before it really caught on.

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