Sameness entices, but novelty enchants in fanfiction online

Cultural evolution is driven by how we choose what to consume and share with others. A common belief is that the cultural artifacts that succeed are the ones that balance novelty and conventionality. This “balance theory” suggests that people prefer works that are familiar, but not so familiar as to be boring; novel, but not so novel as to violate the expectations of their genre. We test this idea using a large dataset of fanfiction, a unique data source that mitigates many common critical shortcomings in the study of creative works. We apply a multiple regression model and a generalized additive model to examine how the recognition a work receives varies with its novelty, estimated through a Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic model, in the context of existing works. We find the opposite pattern of what the balance theory predicts—overall success declines almost monotonically with novelty and exhibits a U-shaped instead of an inverse U-shaped curve. This puzzle is resolved by teasing out two competing forces: sameness attracts the masses whereas novelty provides enjoyment. Taken together, even though the balance theory holds in terms of expressed enjoyment, the overall success can show the opposite pattern due to the dominant role of familiarity to attract the audience. Under these two “forces”, cultural evolution may have to work against inertia—the appetite for consuming the familiar—and may resemble a punctuated equilibrium, marked by occasional leaps.