The Life Cycle of a Social Networking Site

I have a confession to make, a confession that I’m sure will border on sacrilege to a lot of people on the Internet.

I don’t really like Facebook, and the only reason why I have a Facebook account is because just about everyone I know has one.

I think I did like Facebook once, back when only a handful of people used it as a networking tool and before I felt like I had to check it twelve times a day. Having a Facebook account now just seems like a lot of work for very little reward. Ideally, I should log on once or twice a day and read interesting things that my friends have to say or learn the details of a party that I’m invited to. Instead, logging on means reading trite “inspirational” quotes, getting bombarded by invites to games I don’t want to play and seeing memes that stopped being funny weeks ago. It gets really irritating, yet everyone from my social circle to the mainstream media wants me to stay glued to my Facebook wall lest I become hopelessly out of touch with modern society.

Basically, Facebook has become more annoying than useful, but I think it’s actually following what I think is the lifespan of a typical social networking site. Before everyone on the planet had a Facebook account, just about everyone on the planet had a Myspace account. From a technical standpoint, I liked Myspace, and to be honest I thought it was better than Facebook is now. Myspace pages were more customizable than Facebook walls, there were message boards and chat rooms that let you easily talk to users that weren’t on your friends list, and it is still the preferred network for unsigned musicians. Of course, it started going downhill once people started to discover Facebook, but I don’t think it was out of any hatred for its interface. I think what happened was that Myspace became overcrowded with annoying users. The message boards and chat rooms were full of trolls, and it became way too easy to stumble into a really gaudy and poorly designed personal page. I would often see things like ditzy teenage girls who had way too many glitter effects on their pages and suburban white kids who had pictures of themselves flashing gang signs while loud gangsta rap plays. On top of it all, it seemed like everyone was using Myspace to bitch about other people or try to get laid by messaging random users.

Like the rest of the world, I eventually gave up on Myspace and moved on to Facebook. At the time, Facebook seemed like the more mature alternative to the drama-filled teen hangout that Myspace had become. College students and graduates used Facebook. They talked about their college courses. They talked about their careers. They talked about life, politics and society in a respectful manner. In other words, the Facebook crowd acted like adults. As someone who was tired of the constant trolling and high school drama on Myspace, I couldn’t sign up for a Facebook account fast enough.

Unfortunately, just as Myspace became too big and too crowded by stupidity, so has Facebook. Facebook’s interface usually keeps me from stumbling into pages that annoy me as much as some Myspace pages did, but between the sappy quotes, cutesy pictures, game requests and drama-filled status updates there’s plenty to keep me annoyed. Just as I got turned off of Myspace, I’m getting turned off of Facebook, something that I think was inevitable. It’s probably part of the social network life cycle. A shiny new networking site gets people’s attention, people flock to it and have a blast catching up with old friends for a few years, there’s an overload of annoying stupidity after a while, and people leave for the next big thing. Facebook may be the most visited site on the Internet now, and it will probably be going strong in a year or two, but if I’m right it will decline in popularity. People will move on to another social network, and Facebook will be the ghost town/punchline that Myspace has become.

So, if my theory about the rise and fall of social networks is correct, what will the next major social networking site be? Tumblr is already popular for blogging and photo sharing, and Google Plus (or Google+) has been trying really hard to become a Facebook killer. Maybe Myspace will have a renaissance and become king of the Internet again. It recently relaunched with an updated interface, and I would be willing to give it another chance if I knew enough people who were willing to do the same thing.

Until then, you could say that I’m suffering from social network burnout, or at least Facebook burnout. Feel free to continue updating your Facebook page and posting to your wall. If I’m not too annoyed, I might see it.

Then again, maybe I’ll be on Myspace. Hopefully I won’t be the only one.

(Just like my last "I hate Facebook" post, this will probably be shared on Facebook. I am well aware of the irony of that fact, so there's no need to remind me.)

When Facebook Sells Out

I’ve posted about it before long ago, but I’ve been heavily involved in a grassroots movement called SlutWalk Minneapolis, one of the many SlutWalks that took place last year all over the world.  Last year’s SlutWalk was a big success, and we’re gearing up to have another one this year on Saturday, October 6.  Like many successful grassroots organizations in the 21st Century, we’ve relied heavily on Facebook to spread the word on who we are and what we stand for.  We’ve had a lot of success using Facebook to promote not just the Walk itself, but the various other advocacy and fundraising events that led up to it.  We tried to do the same thing this year, but we’ve hit a huge stumbling block.  It turns out that the Facebook page we created for SlutWalk Minneapolis has only been reaching a few of its 2,000-plus subscribers thanks to some new policies that Facebook has put in place.

What are these policies, you ask?  Well, I could describe them, but I think this article covers it better than I ever could.  It’s a long post, but before you stupidly put “too long; didn’t read” in the comments section at least give it a scan.  There’s even an “executive summary” towards the beginning of the article that sums things up nicely.

The long and short of it is that Facebook is using a algorithm called EdgeRank which has an impact on what ends up on your news feed.  Basically, EdgeRank decides what you see from pages that you’ve “liked” based on its relevancy and your interests.  Unfortunately, this means that roughly 84 percent of a page’s subscribers won't see the majority of its posts.

This isn’t anything new; Facebook has been using EdgeRank for at least a year, possibly as far back as 2010.  What is new is Facebook’s Promoted Posts feature, which allows admins to reach more of their subscribers by clicking a handy little “Promote” button on their page.  Oh, and they have to pay a fee for this privilege.

That’s right.  Promoting an event, service, product, indie band or grassroots organization isn’t as simple as creating a Facebook page and getting followers to click “Like” anymore.  You now need to pay Facebook to do something that was once free.  It’s not a small amount, either; admins of pages with thousands of fans can expect to pay hundreds of dollars per post if they want to reach all of their followers.  

To truly realize how bad this latest fuckery can be, try to imagine that you have a small start-up business.  You set up a Facebook fan page because that’s what you do in this day and age.  You hope that it will help to spread the word that you are open for business, but you soon find that those who choose to follow you are barely aware that you exist.  Every advertisement or update that you post is buried under glossy corporate ads from companies that can afford to shell out the money needed to reach all their fans.  Sadly, you do not have this kind of money.  You’ve been effectively thrown under the bus by Facebook’s greedy new policy.

If you ask me, this goes against what social networking sites like Facebook are supposed to do.  They’re supposed to be places where people from all over the world and all walks of life can come together and communicate with each other.  A good social networking site should be the water cooler at work, the town square and a gathering of friends except on a more global scale.  It shouldn’t be yet another place that gets taken over by Corporate America, but that’s apparently what’s happening with Facebook.  Corporate greed is taking over, and once again the little guys are suffering because of it.

My inner anti-establishment grassroots socialist hippie hopes that people will become fed up with this latest turn of events and leave Facebook en masse, but the sad fact of the matter is that I don’t see that happening.  People are sheep, especially in Facebook Land.  A small number of people may rail against this new policy for as long as it’s trendy, but soon enough they’ll go back to sending out their Farmville requests and giving their life stories in status updates without a care in the world.  After all, that’s what you’re “supposed” to do in this day and age.  People practically live and breathe on social networks these days, and for many people Facebook is social networking.  They don’t know anything else. In fact, chances are that you're reading this because of the link I'll soon post on Facebook (I'm well aware of the sad irony of that fact; there's no need to point it out).

For the record, there are other social networks out there.  They may not be as huge as Facebook, but in my opinion they’re closer to what a good social networking site should be.  Everyone is probably at least aware of Twitter, but it’s almost as big as Facebook so I don’t think I need to elaborate on it..  There’s also LiveJournal, of which I’ve been a member since 2009 as TJ1380.  It seems to be slowly dying, though.  There’s also Tumblr, but if you found my blog by scouring the Internet for any length of time you probably know all about that already.  For something closer to Facebook, there’s Google Plus.  It has yet to draw enough of a crowd to be the Facebook killer that it wants so badly to be, but that could still change.  Feel free to sign up and see what it’s all about if you haven’t already.  In fact, sign up for any of these sites.  There are plenty more out there; these are just a few that I like.  Maybe one or more of them can become big enough to be the kind of free promotional tool that Facebook should be.

And now, it’s time for me to help set right what once went wrong...

I mentioned way back at the beginning of this post that I am involved in SlutWalk Minneapolis, a grassroots organization intended to stand against the Rape Culture that is so prevalent in our society.  The Walk itself will be held on October 6, 2012, but we have plenty going on until then.  For starters, we will have an information booth at Twin Cities Pride on June 23 and 24, and we will be walking in the Pride Parade itself on the 24th.  We need volunteers to man the booth and walk with us, so if you’re interested more information can be found here along with information on other upcoming events.  And no, you don’t have to be a “slut” to participate; anybody who is sick of victim blaming, slut-shaming and the Rape Culture can participate and make their voices heard.