Co-Author Jeff Hemsley

Virality is a much-studied topic on popular social media sites, like Twitter, but has been rarely explored on niche sites, such as Dribbble.com, a social network site with around 600,000 users that was created in 2009 for designers to share and get feedback on their work. Interviews confirm that viral-like events do exist on Dribbble. Our informants suggests that what spreads one a site like Dribbble are elements of design, instead of content. They also identify a number of factors they see as driving these viral-like events. In our discussion we show that the same kinds of factors that are seen to drive viral-like events on Dribbble are similar to the factors that drive viral events on larger sites. We argue that these similarities reflect fundamental human behavior underlying social phenomenon across different platforms. Smaller sites like Dribbble are rarely studied, so our work contributes to social media studies, and to the body of research around information diffusion and viral events.