5/22/2021

Headline, May 23 2021/ HELLSITE : ''' '' STUDENTS EXODUS STAMPEDE '' '''


HELLSITE : 

''' '' STUDENTS EXODUS

 STAMPEDE '' '''



STUCK ON SOCIAL MEDIA? WELCOME TO THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY - THE EXCLUSIVE and eternal ownership of every student in the world. Stuckness is struggling to quantify the cost of leaving a network in which you've invested your life.

FACEBOOK SPENT MUCH OF ITS FIRST DECADE FENDING OFF - or acquiring, anything that might credibly call itself the next Facebook, frequently altering the environment around the users it already had in the process.

Later in the same 2012 email exchange, Mr. Zuckerberg characterized the strategy of buying and incorporating competitors and their ''dynamics'' and ''mechanics'' as a way to ''buy time'' before they could reach threatening scales.

The plan worked, or at least has not failed so far : Nothing has been able to supplant Facebook the way Facebook supplanted others, and its network has remained more or less intact.

User-wise, there have been signs in financial disclosures for years that Facebook's core property is reaching some sort of plateau of activity, which could be explained in countless [again seemingly contradictory] ways. Youth exodus, maturity in different markets, misinformation, conflict, boredom, politics.

IT'S A TESTAMENT TO THE POWER OF THE BIGGEST social media platforms that many common complaints about them sound contradictory.

They're accelerators for extremism that simultaneously uphold suffocating consensus. They're wastes of attention and should play a smaller role in people's lives; they also need to be improved, refined and purged of bad actors, whoever you might think they might be.

They're advanced surveillance machines, but they also routinely serve irrelevant recommendations and ads. They're cutting-edge behavior modification tools, but they're also overtly spammy, seeking engagement through clumsy and often misleading notifications.

And for, or despite all those reasons, people can't seem to leave them - a point bolstered by financial statements. Facebook, as a company, is doing extraordinarily well, and Twitter's revenue grew in the last quarter.

Still within the disparate critiques of social media, there is a shared experience for many - a loss of patience with ''this site,'' or a withering assessment of how people behave ''on here.'' An urge to type ''this hellsite'' into the hellsite itself, to like that post about how much hates posting. They're aware of the irony; still, they can't stop. They might even suggest it's their own fault, which it isn't, at least not entirely. They're just stuck. Maybe you are too.

ALL TOGETHER

What does it mean to be stuck, in platform terms? It's not the same as being trapped. You're as free to leave Instagarm as you were to join in in the first place. Neither is being stuck a mere habit, or pattern of personal behavior over which you've lost some amount of conscious control.

Stuckness, instead, is a largely unforeseen consequence of the manner in which modern social networks became popular and powerful in the first place.

Social networks, even the very biggest, are virtually worthless without people - not just as customers, but as sources of value for other customers. The term of art for this phenomenon is the ''network effect,'' a concept predating social media and the Internet in general.

A telephone system, for instance, gets better as more people use it and is at its best when everyone has a number; likewise, a social network needs multiple users to function at all but tends to become more compelling, the more it connects.

Today's biggest social networks were founded by people and supported by investors for whom network effects were both a gospel and a plan; build a network, reach a critical mass, watch it grow, then accelerate, creating an insurmountable advantage over anyone else attempting to connect people in similar ways.

In 2012, in an email exchange with Facebook's then chief financial officer that was revealed in 2020 during a U.S. House antitrust subcommittee hearing Mark Zuckerberg made his case for buying up smaller competitors, among them, at the time Instagram:

''There are network effects around social products and a finite number of different social social mechanics to invent.

Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it's difficult for others supplant them without doing something different.''

It's a tidy way to understand the process that led to the popular Internet of today; a bunch of companies trying to establish unassailable and maximally broad networks through the use of different ''mechanics'' [i.e. styles of sharing or connection or content production].

It also hints at the fear that each network could fail as quickly as it succeeded if a critical mass of users has enough reason to leave - producing, basically, a death spiral.

Still, Facebook remains the only Facebook. And that dominance has led some users to reasonably feel stuck with the platform. The networks people signed up for in the aught have changed beneath their feet and lasted longer than even their creators might have imagined - realizing network effects to their theoretical extremes.

The Honor and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research and writings on Students and Social Media, continues. The World Students Society thanks author John Herrman.

With most loving and respectful dedication to the Global Founder Framers of The World Students Society, and then Mankind, Grandparents, Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on !WOW! : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

''' Stuck - Style '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

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