

Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace? - sga
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/25474/

======
ZachPruckowski
>during the period beginning in 2006 when teens began to flock to Facebook,
teens' preference for either MySpace or Facebook appeared to fall along lines
of race and class.

The obvious answer to this is that Facebook was closed to the general public
until September 2006. In 2004 to early 2005, you had to be a college student
at a top-30 or so school to be able to use Facebook. Throughout 2005, that
loosened to all colleges. In Sept. 2005, they opened to "invited"
highschoolers.

So let's flash-forward to September 25, 2006. MySpace's population is drawn
from the general public, and Facebook's population is "college students,
recent college grads from top schools, and high schoolers who are friends with
college students". The next day, Facebook opens to everyone. If you don't have
many friends who are "college students, recent college grads from top schools,
and high schoolers who are friends with college students", you have little
incentive to join Facebook.

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sprout
Don't conflate class divisions with racism. Whites did not flee the 'digital
ghetto' of Myspace. College-educated young adults fled the 'digital ghetto' of
Myspace.

~~~
simonsez
As whites and asians disproportionally make up the college body in the US it's
quite possible these two are the same.

~~~
johnohara
Grammatically, "disproportionately" would have been a better choice for your
utterly ridiculous statement.

~~~
simonsez
Thanks for correcting my grammar, and thanks for explaining why you think my
statement is "utterly ridiculous".

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SecretAgentMan
could it just be that MySpace gave its users too much freedom in page design
and it turned into an ugly, blinking, unreadable, music auto-playing pile of
s#it?

And then people left?

~~~
gyardley
Maybe. Aesthetic tastes differ, and the paper does provide some anecdotes
suggesting that MySpace's profiles appealed more to certain racial and
socioeconomic groups.

However, social networks do a pretty good job at segregating - as long as your
friends are bourgeois and share your bourgeois design sensibilities, you can
use MySpace without bumping into too much 'profile bling'.

Instead, it seems that some white and Asian kids of high socioeconomic status
joined Facebook because it was associated with elite universities and
therefore reflected their aspirations - and once this process started, people
went where their friends were, self-segregating along racial and economic
lines just like they do in high school (and throughout the rest of society.)
Aesthetic tastes became a socially-acceptable _justification_ for that move,
but I don't think they were the primary cause.

That said, a good knowledge of the aesthetic preferences of various social
groups could be valuable. Could a startup trigger a similar 'white flight' in
an established service by intentionally appealing to the most economically
valuable demographic? Can we build good niche businesses by creating things
like race-specific Twitter clients?

~~~
patio11
_Can we build good niche businesses by creating things like..._

Yes. And they'd be "niche" in the sense that Fox News is "niche." (Best
comment on Fox ever: "They discovered a previously untapped market niche: half
the country.")

Half the country, literally, is so far off the radar screen for most software
companies it is embarrassing.

There are dating sites for every conceivable slice of the demographic pie.
This applies to many other sites too, although I think a lot of folks don't
realize it. (You guys know Demand Media because of their SEO strategy, not
because they are dominating the Internet of interest to your demographic.)

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far33d
Did white college kids actively flee MySpace, or were they never on MySpace?
Targeting college campuses could very likely have had the effect of attracting
a lot of users who had never used social networks before. Flight implies
presence in the old location.

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steveitis
I don't know, but I've been describing twitter as a 'digital ghetto' for
months now.

If they don't put a stop to the spammers, and build some better tools to
filter users they're gonna get MySpaced in a big way.

 __EDIT __This stunning bit of prose just came across my feed: "LOL NIGGAS IS
SO FUNNY .... FUCK IT !"

I don't want to see this, anymore than they want to see me talk about agile
software development.

~~~
DotSauce
Why did you follow that person?

~~~
steveitis
I followed them back after they followed me, so in a way it's my fault... In
another it isn't. The whole follow me, and I'll follow you thing is effective
from a marketing point of view, which is why the place is filled with useless
affiliate spam.

They could stop allowing that sort of behavior, but they know that a large
part of their user-base consists of 'self marketers' and other less subtle
spam.

Why can't I sort or filter any of my incoming tweets in any meaningful way? I
can have favorites. I can make lists. I CAN'T just type in 'F _ck', and stop
my feed from showing me the tweets with the word 'F_ ck' in them.

I can search for tweets about 'Ruby On Rails', but I can't just add those
people to a list called 'Ruby On Rails' without clicking each one of them...
Several times.

To top it off their API is so limited that just retrieving a list of the
people I'm following means I get blocked for an hour before I can do anything
with it, and bypassing their silly API is against the TOS. So writing my own
tool to filter properly is straight out.

I wanted to write a simple naive Bayesian filter app to separate the wheat
from the chaff for me, but they make it damned near impossible to do so
without being sued.

~~~
michaelcampbell
> I followed them back after they followed me, so in a way it's my fault... In
> another it isn't

In no way is that not your fault. None whatsoever.

I do agree that a filtering mechanism would be MUCH appreciated, however.

~~~
steveitis
You are a coder, aren't you?

Let me restate it more precisely: The fact that my needs are not being met is
their fault. The fact that I have those needs is mine.

My use case, and those of many others, requires the ability to 'follow' others
and still filter their 'useful' postings from their 'non-useful' postings.
This is 'my fault', in that I require more from the service than they are
either willing or able to provide at this time.

Twitter has reduced my ability to use the service, in the way that I would
most like to, by limiting their API and preventing screen scrapers from
functioning in a legal and non-harmful way. None of this is any way my fault.

I still think my original phrasing was more concise, if not as explicit.

------
masyanya
Ughhh I hope something comes around and people leave Facebook behind.
Companies like Quora scare the hell out of me: I don't have either twitter or
facebook account, so apparently I'm "out of the loop". If this goes on people
like me are risking complete isolation (or faking it, which isn't appealing)

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mikecane
I loved MySpace originally, then I left MySpace.

1) Craptastic, browser-clogging pages 2) Audio player that kept changing and
getting worse 3) Mail full of VOTE FOR ME!!!!!1111 spam 4) Everyone basically
begging you to frikkin BUY something of theirs 5) The Walled Garden: Hellish
trying to link back to it

There was no direction, no sense that anyone was in charge. This is the second
online catastrophe for Murdoch. He has the Kiss of Death for digital.

EDIT: And during my time there, there was never a racial component to
anything. It's really a tragedy too. There was music there I never found as
easily anywhere else.

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p3ll0n
For a more humorous take on this issue check out

<http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/31/106-facebook/>

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jeb
The article makes a big, big mistake. The same proportion of black people left
myspace, but if you are white on facebook, and your friends are mostly white,
then facebook looks like a white place. Same with blacks - if you are black
and your friends are mostly black on facebook, it looks like a black place.

Myspace looks "ghetto" simply because there are more minority bands, and so
more minorities still maintain active facebook profiles.

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ratcliffco
Is't MySpace closely tied to music preferences? Maybe a few influential bands
heavily invested into MySpace presence and their audience happened to be
black?

~~~
Kadin
I'm not sure that MySpace was ever associated that closely with a small number
of bands, but it certainly was/is associated with bands and self-promotion in
general.

At least in the beginning (this has changed as Facebook has become more
mainstream), you didn't hear people in "up and coming" bands flogging their
Facebook URL, it was all MySpace. The flipside of that was, if you were just a
regular person looking to interact with your friends, and _not_ someone trying
to 'build a brand' or tell people what club you were playing at this weekend,
Facebook seemed like the place to go.

The article talks about spammers, and spam was/is certainly a problem, but
MySpace turned itself into a vehicle for self-promotion much earlier and more
crassly than Facebook did. I think that shaped the direction of the site and
drove users who weren't looking for that away.

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sedachv
It's "danah boyd." All lowercase.

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DotSauce
MySpace is planning a major rebranding / relaunch soon.

via <http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=144480>

~~~
yep_yeppers
But how far can they get with just a relaunch? Unless they find the perfect
mix of privacy, clean interface, and a huge influx of people, a relaunch would
be all for naught.

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minalecs
if MySpace is the digital ghetto, then twitter is the graffiti covered walls
of the ghetto.

