Social media websites typically fail slowly before failing quickly.

In the aughts, I devoted an absurd amount of effort to attempting to comprehend the emergence and decline of social networking sites like Myspace and Friendster. I discovered an intriguing item. A central node in a network could take some of their connections with them to a new site if they left and moved there (for example, from Myspace to Facebook). However, users ceased participating as much if the accounts on the website that evoked emotional intensity stopped doing so. As I saw Friendster crumble, I began to believe that the loss of emotionally strong nodes was a bigger issue than the loss of graph segments.

I was looking for the point with Myspace where I believed it was going to fall apart. I contacted members of the Myspace team to express my concerns when I started noticing the absence of emotionally charged nodes, and they assured me that everything was great with their figures. The number of unique users who were active was high, the average time spent on the site was increasing, and the number of new accounts being opened outpaced the number of accounts being closed. I shook my head, not believing that was sufficient. The site started to fall apart a few months later.

I was speaking with a cis/hetero dating service on a different project about their fraud problems. Its "false" identities, many of which were alleged "women," were actually a scheme to get users to pay for a porn site. However, when the website began deleting these profiles, they discovered that the website as a whole was disintegrating. These false women didn't appeal to the men, but their attractive profiles made them come back. Additionally, attractive women perceived the site to be full of visitors who were more attractive than them as a result of these profiles and came. The real women also vanished along with the false ones. So did the guys, too.

Network effects and perception combine to influence how important a site is to people on a personal and societal level.

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