The Social Media Life Cycle

Over the years, I've seen a certain pattern play out on site after site. It happened to LiveJournal and MySpace, it happened to countless minor services that never hit the big time, and it's happening to Facebook and Twitter as we speak. 

Phase One: Cool New Service

The cool new site wants as many users as possible, so it's all free, and there are no ads anywhere. Everyone joins up, and the site is useful to many. 

Phase Two: Oops, Out of Money! 

Web sites cost money.  Eventually, the company behind the cool new service runs out of investor's money, and has to monetize their users somehow. 

Phase Three: The Decline 

The site fill up with ads and "sponsored content," or it starts charging money for something that used to be free. The users start departing to greener pastures, which usually kicks off a vicious cycle, as the owners ramp up the monetization of their shrinking user base. 

After MySpace collapsed, I remember thinking, maybe one big site is a mistake. Maybe we should all just have our own blogs, and just follow each other on RSS. 

If this sounds like proto-fediverse thinking, you are correct. I've started using Mastodon here. 

There is more to this thread. Stay tuned for a follow up post.