Cumulative Advantage

I've been posting mixes on 8tracks lately. I like the site a lot in general. One specific criticism I have is that a user is unable to sort mixes by the most-listened-to-mix over the last day, week, month, etc. Instead there is only the option to sort through the the most listened to mixes since the inception of the site two years ago. Is this a minor inconvenience or unintentional shift of their paradigm? Carl Wilson, the author of A Journey To the End of Taste, might argue the latter based on this excerpt:

But the bias that "conformity" is perjorative has led, I think, to underestimating the part mimesis - imitation - plays in taste. It's always other people following crowds, whereas my own taste reflects my specialness. A striking demonstration of the mimetic effect comes from a group of Columbia University sociologists, who took advantage of the Internet as a zone in which you can conduct large-scale simulations of mass-culture behavior, isolated from advertising and other distorting factors. They set up a website (as researcher Duncan J. Watts explains in a 2007 New York Times Magazine article) called Music Lab, where 14,000 registered participants were asked to "listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of." One group could see only song titles and band names the rest were divided into eight "worlds", and could see which songs in their "world" were most downloaded. In these "social-influence worlds", as soon as a song generated a few downloads, more people began downloading it. Higher-rated songs did do somewhat better, but each world had differing "hits", depending which songs "caught on" there first. They called the effect "cumulative advantage" a rule that popularity tends to amplify exponentially. (In the control group, quality ratings and popularity usually matched.) Does this mean people are lemmings? No, just that we're social: we are curious what everybody else is hearing, want to belong, want to have things in common to talk about. We are also insecure about our own judgments and want to check them against others. So songs might in part be famous simply for being famous. Intriguingly, as Watts notes, "Introducing social influence into human decision making . . . didn't just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable."