So, who remembers back when the earliest forms of social media were still good? I had a Livejournal for a good few years before going inactive, and finally giving up after a while. I never did get into Myspace, because by the time I got curious it was already jam-packed with autoplaying songs and content that made my eyes bleed. I was a fairly early adopter of Facebook, back when you couldn’t join without a school email address. And I joined Twitter in 2008, though I didn’t really become active until a couple years later.
So what changes? Why does everyone seem to move on from one social media company to the next over the years? I can’t speak for everyone, of course, but one thing I think had a lot to do with it: Going Corporate.
Every business wants to make money. That’s a normal thing. What’s unfortunate is that the lure of money time and time again causes people who had a great idea to do stupid things to their idea in order to try to make bigger and bigger profits on it, and that’s by and large the downfall of every social media network as well.
Take Livejournal. They started out ad-free, and that didn’t work out for them at all. They instated paid accounts, and then advertising, and more advertising, and then took away free account signup. This wasn’t purely motivated by greed, but rather by the time the founder was having to spend on administrative work. Either way, Livejournal’s sale to Six Apart and its subsequent decline has a rather direct association with its actions taken to make more and more money.
Facebook is an interesting conundrum. I think in their case, the problem isn’t so obvious because for every person jumping ship, there’s another older person joining. Facebook has become the meeting place for adults, rather than for children. The social network that you have an account on because everybody else does, but since your parents are there too, you’re never going to bother to say anything important. The corporate machine has really eroded the service itself, though. You’re constantly bombarded by advertisements that you didn’t ask for. Those parents and older folks are asked to “like” everything that they happen to like, and as a result you get stories all the time in your news feed about how your dad likes this car company, and your mom likes that clothing line. It’s not even possible anymore to outright tell Facebook to not tell you about stories relating to the apps and games that others are playing, the best you can do is push it to a rarely-checked sidebar area that always seems to be whining that you never check it. Privacy isn’t even that private anymore when companies can pay to contact you despite those settings. Users are slowly but steadily being driven away, or driven to at least ignore Facebook and not spend any more time on it than necessary. I may have a couple hundred friends on Facebook, but I don’t see more than a dozen or so updates a day anymore. It’s quickly becoming the social network that everyone has but nobody wants to use.
Twitter is the latest social network to succumb to these problems. API 1.1 is driven by nothing more than greed on the part of the company. Who cares about the average user, they say, when we can make more and more money by forcing API changes upon them? They don’t need to enjoy their experience, they need to see more and more ads so we can make this money machine run! And so Twitter is starting to run into the same problem with every day that passes. They’ve alienated the very developers that made them great by forcing them to deal with inane changes and suppressing innovation in the name of a consistent brand experience. Guess what, Twitter? We don’t want your brand, we want to have fun and enjoy our Tweeting experience without you getting in the way of that at every turn. We want to read what our friends say without having ad after ad shoved in our face. You need more money? Fine, I’ll give you $5 a year to shut up and and let me enjoy it without the ads, and with a client that actually works and isn’t a piece of crap. I’m sure that’s more than you’re making off me in advertisements right now. Hell, I’ll even help some of my friends pay that token price if it means they can roleplay with me without being told what they can and can’t be allowed to use to post their replies with.
Corporate greed is going to likely be what kills Twitter, as it has with so many others. Go check out Wikipedia’s article on Social Media, the paragraph on history, here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_networking_service#History
How many of those services are still alive and in good health today? How many do you even REMEMBER?
The thing is, if you keep pandering to the companies giving you money at the cost of your users, your userbase is going to diminish. Maybe not right away, but over time people are going to get tired of the ads and the way they’re being forced to experience the website the way the greedy corporate trash upstairs wants them to. As people leave, others realize that their friends are leaving and leave as well. More and more companies and big personalities are flocking to Twitter, but as the normal users start to find greener pastures, eventually Twitter will have nothing left but companies tweeting at each other blindly, or tweeting at users long inactive. The noise will outweigh the signal, and that’s the day that Twitter will die.
It’s sad that no one seems to ever learn from history. Or maybe they think that it’ll be different for them. Or maybe they just want to siphon every last dollar out of it that they can, believing that people won’t stay forever no matter what they do. Most likely, though, it’s just because the higher-ups decide that they want that second car, and that boat, and a home in the Florida Keys, and the only way to get that is to get more people to give them another boatload of money.
And then a second boatload, because the first one is lonely.
Kortir 