Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for the exits. Here’s danah [...]
I think it is a big mistake to underestimate the effect of having reached the critical mass of users. It will not die easily (spez is working hard to achieve this), much less quickly.
MySpace and digg still exist as well. Social media sites don’t die in the typical sense of the word, but they “die” nonetheless. More like abandoned malls than 6 feet under
No idea MySpace still existed. it just looks like some entertainment article website, weird…
Yeah it’s changed focus a few times. They focused on music for a while, then pivoted to entertainment news. Surprisingly they still have around 100 employees.
Some years ago they “lost” a lot of data during a data center migration. MySpace was the go-to place for small indie bands in the mid to late 2000s, so a lot of music that was only available on MySpace is totally lost now. People didn’t get a chance to archive it, since MySpace didn’t announce it beforehand.
I say “lost” because my opinion is that it was expensive for them to keep storing all that data and so they just deleted it all and made up an excuse.