Are news hype topics based on demand, or chance? (expert opinion plz) - marojejian
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cocktailpeanuts
Here's what a true "expert" would say: "nobody knows".

Anyone who claims to understand the complex nature of human behavior is either
a fraud or inexperienced (therefore not an "expert").

There are so many factors in play and not one is deterministically the single
dominant reason that these things happen. "it depends".

For example, Google Glass got hyped up because Google--one of the most
powerful tech companies in the world--was behind it. So was Pokemon Go.
Pokemon already had a powerful brand.

Chat Roulette got hyped up because it was viral--it actually had tons of usage
--this one is completely different from google glass because there clearly was
demand, but like many other random/anonymous apps they failed to figure out
the solution to keep the service quality up.

AI is a bit different, because it was almost a perfect storm of all kinds of
things happening simultaneously. It was part artificial pr (like google glass)
and part substance (Google did succeed in improving their AI engine so that it
actually beat the Go master, and they also open sourced Tensorflow, etc.)

Bots was mostly hyped up by VCs and entrepreneurs who got sick of platform
dependence. Because mobile has become the dominant platform and iOS appstore
and google play store de facto duopoly, the startup guys wanted to get away
from that and tried so hard to "make bots happen", but it was flawed from the
beginning because these guys are supposed to be building products for users,
whereas the whole bots movement was focused on the VCs and founders themselves
instead of users.

So yeah, it depends.

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marojejian
OP: I'm talking about hype cycles on topics such as: Bots, AI, or if your
memory serves: Google Glass, Pokemon-Go, Chat Roulette etc.

Many of these topics had real events behind them, but then they dominate &
persist in news circles (esp tech) for a long time.

Is this because:

1) Readers are more interested in these topics (even after a while) & thus
such news outperforms financially

or

2) They randomly get above a threshold, then the new outlets follow each
other, and then readers feel they need to keep reading these stories, to keep
in the loop.

3) Other

