I think the real problem here is that big media corporations seem to believe that social media userbases are fungible, and persist in acting on this belief no matter how many times it’s demonstrated to be wrong.
There’s a specific pattern of events that plays out over and over (and over) again, and it looks something like this:
1. Social media platform becomes popular
2. Social media platform is purchased by big media corporation in order to gain access to it large user base
3. Big media corporation realises that social media platform’s demographics are not the demographics they want to sell things to.
4. Big media corporation institutes measures to drive away “undesirable” users, apparently in the honest belief that the outgoing users will automatically be replaced by an equal number of new, more demographically desirable users
5. This does not, in fact, occur
6. Social media platform crashes and burns
You’d think that, by the sheer law of averages, at least one person who’s capable of learning from experience would become involved in this whole process at some point.
That person has been fired
The media execs fail their math. Specifically, they fail the network theory.
They look at the numbers, like Tumblr’s where only 1% of the users make 99% of the explicit content, if I remember a recent study right. So, why don’t we lose that 1% and live happily ever after? – an exec says.
Because! The networks on social media are decentralized, and the 1% are the key nodes:
Those local nodes are load-bearing, like the cornerstones of a building. Remove them, and the network falls apart and dies.
Soundwave has that image on his wall, because he’s competent:
As someone on Twitter said: that’s load-bearing porn.
I know conventions that (eventually) ended because certain people stopped attending. The attrition took a few years to have an impact, but once those people stopped going, some of their friends stopped going in following years. And once THOSE people stopped going, *their* friends stopped going in following years. In one particular case, by the time you hit the third iteration of that, most of the people *I* usually went to hang out with were no longer going, so *I* stopped going. And that year, three people said to me, “You know, you were one of the last people left that I wanted to go hang out with, so I guess I won’t bother to go this year either,” and I doubt I’m the only one who had a variant of that conversation with their friends that year. It was like,“You tell three friends and they tell three friends,” only with the opposite effect that is usually hoped for with that kind of networking. Eventually the event didn’t have enough paying attendees to afford to continue.
Sometimes you don’t know what qualifies as load-bearing until it is taken out and things start to collapse.
Aaaand sometimes it’s really fucking obvious and you were a fool to flag every single instance of it as “inappropriate” and queue it for deletion.
elfarock 