An excerpt from Duncan Watts, Everything Is Obvious: when you know the answer* (2012, chapter 3)
Although it is rarely presented as such, this kind of circular reasoning—X succeeded because X had the attributes of X—pervades commonsense explanations for why some things succeed and others fail. For example, an article on the success of the Harry Potter books explained it this way:
“A Cinderella plot set in a novel type of boarding school peopled by jolly pupils already has a lot going for it. Add in some easy stereotypes illustrating meanness, gluttony, envy, or black-hearted evil to raise the tension, round off with a sound, unchallenging moral statement about the value of courage, friendship, and the power of love, and there already are some of the important ingredients necessary for a match-winning formula.”
In other words, Harry Potter was successful because it had exactly the attributes of Harry Potter, and not something else.
Likewise, when Facebook first became pop