How a Recommendation Travels

Watch a recommendation move and it never moves in a straight line. It goes from one person to another person, sits dormant for four months, gets mentioned once in a car, and then arrives at somebody who acts on it the same night. The distance travelled has almost nothing to do with how good the thing is and almost everything to do with how portable the sentence around it was.

Portability is a design property. A tip survives being repeated by somebody who has not experienced the thing yet. That is the test. If the only way to convey the appeal is to describe the whole experience in order, the recommendation dies at the first retelling, because nobody retells a summary. What survives is a hook the size of a sentence, ideally one with a small contradiction in it, because contradictions are easy to carry.

The second thing that determines travel is who is holding it. Every social group has one person who is the routing station for a particular category, and that person is not usually the most knowledgeable one. They are the one with the loosest connections. Knowledge concentrates in tight groups; recommendations move through loose ones. A tip handed to an expert tends to stay with the expert, who has better ones already.

There is also a decay rate. Every hand a recommendation passes through strips out one detail, and by the fourth hand it is usually only a title and an adjective. That decay is not a failure. It is the mechanism. A thing that arrives with no context arrives with no expectations either, and no expectations is the best condition in which to meet anything. The person who finally acts on it is meeting it clean.

Which suggests something slightly uncomfortable for anybody who makes a weekly list: your job is not to be the last hand. Your job is to be an early hand that packs the thing well enough to survive four more. That means resisting the urge to explain everything you noticed, because everything you noticed is exactly what gets stripped out first, and the effort spent on it is spent on cargo that will be thrown overboard.

The best signal that a recommendation has actually travelled is that it comes back to you distorted. Somebody tells you about a thing you told them about, with a different reason attached and one important detail wrong, and they have no memory of where they got it. That is not annoying. That is the finished state. It has stopped being your opinion and started being a thing that exists in the world.

Everything in the format follows from this. Keep the sentence short so it can be carried. Put the reason in the sentence so the reason gets carried with it. Do not attach your own name to it too tightly, because a tip that requires its source to stay attached will stall the moment it reaches somebody who does not know the source. And then let it go, and stop checking on it.

A recommendation you can trace the whole path of has not gone very far. The ones that worked are the ones you lost track of.