

This is what a social-network exodus looks like - nostrademons
http://nostrademons.livejournal.com/friends

======
nostrademons
This is time-sensitive, but as of 2:00 AM PDT Saturday, only _one_ out of the
8 most recent entries on my LiveJournal friendslist is _not_ about Dreamwidth.
There are many other friendslocked or older posts also saying "I'm moving to
Dreamwidth; find me at xxx."

I posted this because there is a persistent belief among technorati that
social networks benefit from large network effects that prevent users from
switching, even if the underlying software sucks. When I've said "No, users
just use the social network as a venue to tell everyone where to find them,
and then whole groups of people migrate en masse," people have asked me "Well,
do you know of any cases of this actually happening." Well, here's one.

This is not unique at all - LiveJournal has had persistent problems with whole
cliques of users splitting off to form other sites, eg. JournalFen, Plogs,
uJournal, and GreatestJournal, because of the ease of forking their codebase.
Hacker News started largely as dissatisfied Reddit users moved to a site where
the quality of debate was higher. FictionAlley started after dissatisfied
users migrated en masse from Fanfiction.net.

~~~
aston
So the smart social networks create lock-in. Here're a few things Facebook
does (all of which are smart and some of which were probably not done solely
for lock-in).

1) Encourage the uploading of lots of pictures without an easy way to download
them again in a batch. Same thing goes for chat and mail messages.

2) Encourage high friend counts via the friend suggestion tool so that a small
number of friends leaving as a clique have minimal impact on your overall
experience.

3) Hide the defriending process so you aren't notified when friends leave the
service. In fact the news feed, has so much in it now, you probably wouldn't
notice anyone's absence even if they did notify you. You'd probably not see a
"goodbye" group half your friends were joining, either...

Which is to say, Facebook may retain users a little better than Livejournal.

~~~
nostrademons
LiveJournal has all those too:

1) In most cases, these people have _7 years_ of accumulated journal entries,
all tagged and memory'd, which is a significant chunk of their life. And these
are harder to get at than FaceBook photos, because you typically write a LJ
post directly into the browser, yet you upload photos from your computer. I
dunno about you, but I keep a backup of every photo I send to FaceBook.

2) Ditto LiveJournal via communities, at least among this user base. I've got
200+ friends on LJ, though most are inactive, having moved to FaceBook when
they went to college. Some of the people in question have hit the LJ technical
max of 500 friends (I think this is now 750, largely because of their
complaints). Instead of their high friend counts preventing them from leaving,
though, it makes the impact worse. They act like "superconnectors" in _The
Tipping Point_ , spreading the word to lots and lots of their friends.

3.) The defriending process on LiveJournal is also silent; it happens to be
noisy here because people _announce_ that they're leaving (which they can do
on FaceBook too, through shared links, wall posts, status messages, etc.)

I think that the real reason FaceBook hasn't seen an exodus is:

a.) As mentioned elsewhere, they're really not that bad a site. FaceBook still
actively develops the code, they've got a real corporate communications
department, and they're basically a "serious business". That prevents them
from making the sort of pissing-off-users fiascos that LJ has been plagued
with.

b.) They've tried very hard _not_ to cultivate passionate users. FaceBook
users basically use it as a utility to keep track of friends and don't think
too much about it, so when they leave, they just stop using it and don't try
to convince all their friends to leave with them. While LiveJournal users tend
to let their lives get very, very wrapped up in LiveJournal, so they have a
large emotional investment in it and get very upset when that investment is
betrayed.

------
ShabbyDoo
We all* know about bars/clubs/etc. that went from being THE place on X night
to closing up in a matter of three or four years. The local paper (Cleveland)
featured an interview with a club owner who was closing up a location that,
only three years earlier, was a favorite spot of LeBron James and was packed
several nights a week. Instead of complaining about his change in fortune, he
proposed that this is the natural cycle of the club scene. As places get more
popular, they become less exclusive and convey less social status on their
patrons. So, those people with the most social status are courted elsewhere,
and the masses again follow. The cycle repeats.

Freakonomics noted that baby names are usually introduced by wealthier folks
and later adopted by poorer people. At that point, they are shunned by the
wealthy.

Is there a reason that social networking sites should not exhibit similar
patterns? Quite a few articles have been written about how the cool kids went
to FB first. Are we simply witnessing the expected?

* Even if you hate going to these places, you probably are still aware of them.

------
delano
Let's not forget the Friendster exodus. That was pretty extreme.

~~~
gaius
The Friendster exodus wasn't _to_ anywhere tho'. People just stopped using it.
Facebook came along later.

~~~
delano
I don't know the numbers but my understanding at the time was that many people
went to MySpace and later settled on Facebook when it came out.

