Cory Doctorow
I hated Facebook from the start and couldn't wait for it to die. That was a reasonable thing to expect. After all, I'd watched social networks from Sixdegrees on crash and burn as the network effects that drove their growth also drove their precipitous collapse.
A system enjoys "network effects" if it increases in value as it adds users. Social networks are all about these effects: you join Facebook because your friends are there, and once you join, others sign up because *you* are there.
1/
Cory Doctorow
There's a whole universe of people - like your boss, or a creepy co-worker - who seem to sincerely think they're your pal, even though you *loathe* them. When those people friend you, you have to friend them back.
This dynamic is so common that I wrote an article about in 2007, entitled, "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook."
https://www.informationweek.com/it-life/how-your-creepy-ex-co-workers-will-kill-facebook
5/
Cory Doctorow
Actually, it's worse than difficult. It's *anti*-social. Your partner or your bestie knows when you're pissed off at them, but that doesn't mean you should create a world-readable sign that says "I hate this person (right now)." That's a recipe for *staying* mad.
And those are the easy cases. Because at least the people who love and who love you care about your happiness.
4/
Cory Doctorow
Social networks insist that we articulate our relations to one another, pinning down the way we feel about the people in our lives.
The problem here is that the most important part of our relationships are hard to pin down. The opposite of "love" isn't "hate" - it's *indifference*. It's surprisingly common to feel a mixture of emotions towards the people who matter the most in your life. Pinning down an emotion that fluctuates from moment to moment is difficult.
3/
Cory Doctorow
But there's a hard corollary: systems driven by network effects *lose* value when users leave. Your blender doesn't get better when someone else gets a blender of their own, but it also doesn't get worse when someone else throws theirs away.
Social networks are prone to sudden collapses, in part because of the double-edged sword of network effects - but also because of the intrinsic dynamics of social networking.
2/
Cory Doctorow
Having captured Instagram, Facebook ruthlessly strangled potential competitors. It tricked millions of users into installing a fake battery monitor called Onavo, which spied on their mobile usage, giving Facebook the strategic intelligence it needed to keep rivals like Snap at bay:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362
8/
Cory Doctorow
Facebook used a mix of tactics to extend its shelf-life and increase its influence, and its network effect advantage let it grow, and grow, and grow.
Facebook owes its longevity in part to its anticompetitive conduct. By 2012, young users were fleeing Facebook, which was being colonized by their parents and teachers. They flocked to Instagram, so Facebook just *bought* Instagram, ensuring that its disgruntled users could not escape its grasp.
7/
Cory Doctorow
It describes how, over time, the coziness and connection of a friend-list populated by people you genuinely like becomes an exhausting morass of people you don't really like, but can't kick off the list, and how you are almost certainly oblivious to the fact that you're someone *else*'s exhausting not-really-a-friend.
Back in 2007, I thought we'd soon be free of the scourge of Facebook. I was wrong.
6/
Bobinas P4G is a social network. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.1-beta0, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All Bobinas P4G content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.