3/19/2026 at 8:46:27 PM
Two concepts that help explain the original article are Diffusion of Innovations and Social Proof.Diffusion of Innovations is a widely cited theory explaining why people do or don't adopt any kind of innovation, from boiling water to eating limes on British ships to installing telephones. The concept of innovators, early adopters, and late adopters comes from this theory. More relevant to this post is that this theory posits five factors contributing to adoption, one of which is Observability: you can easily see other people gaining benefit from an innovation. The more Observable an innovation, the more likely it is to be adopted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
The other is Social Proof. Seeing what other people are doing, especially those that are similar to you in some way, can help steer your behavior, often in subtle and unconscious ways. There are studies about how simple signs like "people who stayed in this hotel room re-used their towels" or "most of your neighbors are reducing their electricity usage too" can shift people's behaviors, even without people explicitly realizing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof
My colleagues and I used these concepts in several pieces of research on what we called Social Cybersecurity (joking that the term "Social Security" was already taken). The insight we had was that cybersecurity has very low observability, making it hard for innovations to diffuse through one's social network. That is, I don't know what your cybersecurity practices are, and vice versa, making it hard for best practices to be adopted.
One intervention we did was a large-scale intervention on Facebook to improve observability, showing that simple messages like "108 of your friends use extra security settings" did increase clickthru and adoption rates of those settings. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2660267.2660271
We also have many other studies along similar lines, e.g. many triggers for talking about and adopting security are social in nature (https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/soups2014/sou...), that security settings that are more social in nature are more likely to be adopted (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2675133.2675225), and more.
by jasonhong
3/19/2026 at 9:28:10 PM
Nearly 20 years ago after reading Diffusion of Innovations I decided to use everything in the book. The company ran off a few svn servers (formally cvs) and so I ran a handful of Git courses at my work to help us ultimately migrate to Git (this was early days of Git). I explicitly tried to find folks not just near me, but physically around the office building across all of the floors, teams, and orgs. They were my early adopters and when random folks would come to me either curious or for help I would bring them to the "local" expert and together solve their problem, from there they had a local expert and little hubs sprung up. We had the standard svn => git mirror going when the time came to convert to Git full time in the office it was very painless and a complete success.I was too young to understand that this is how you run a successful "transformation project", I simply was having fun using every trick from that book and done the same playbook a number of times over my career.
by r0ze-at-hn
3/20/2026 at 12:12:58 AM
[dead]by aaron695