3W4DW: The exodus to Facebook and Tumblr

[liv]

Got into a discussion with damerell about the fact that so many people have left LJ and DW and all gone to Facebook, which is just unspeakably awful. And ayngelcat chimed in with the comment that it is't Facebook that everybody's gone to, but Tumblr.

I tend to pontificate about FB fairly regularly, but hey, one more can't hurt. I absolutely agree that Facebook is unspeakably awful, and it's not because I'm some enlightened super-geek who can see through their façade; everybody thinks FB is awful. The awfulness of FB is a standard small-talk topic among grandparents who are only just getting to grips with using their first computer. But we're all using it anyway. Well, some people have managed to stay out of its tentacles, but "I don't have a Facebook account" is really the new "I don't have a TV" for showing off one's elite status.

So what, exactly, is FB's killer feature? I'm coming to think the answer is in fact not just one thing. It's not quite a boiling frog thing, it's that it's gone through so many incarnations where it was providing some useful feature, and when the PTB decided to revise what it was trying to do, everybody was already there so it was easier to use FB for whatever new purpose than to leave when it stopped being good for the old purpose.

Who remembers when FB was restricted to just a few American university campuses? Then it was very useful, a low-key way to meet people at your uni and friends-of-friends. That created an atmosphere where people felt very comfortable being startlingly open under their real names. I mean, it's a bit silly to trust everybody who happens to go to the same university as you, but it's less ridiculously self-destructive than trusting, like, everybody on the internet with your innermost thoughts. But the trusting your classmates thing set up the atmosphere where people talk about about their personal lives online, and why FB was far more successful than earlier incarnations of automated systems for meeting friends-of-friends (Can you say Friendster with a straight face? Orkut?).

So when FB grew beyond being an electronic version of a campus noticeboard, it was already primed to be a much better replacement for things like classmates.com and Friends Reunited. I appreciate as per the discussion on my earlier post that some people would rather stab their eyes out with a rusty spork than have any contact with the people they were at school with, but the majority of people are quite glad to have a low-effort way of satisfying curiosity about people they've encountered at earlier stages of their life. The culture of using wallet names and real-world contact details that had already built up helped with that, and indeed for a while FB acted like a magical self-updating address book. I remember being quite excited about it when that's what it did, jumping through hoops to get an Oxford alumni email address in order to get a FB account.

Then I think there was a phase where several different things coincided to give FB a lot of traction. They had some really good publicity going for a bit back in the late 2000s, I remember when every newspaper I picked up had an opinion piece / advertorial on how FB was going to be the future and everybody had better join it quick or they'd be left behind. The self-updating address book thing combined really well with the events system, which many people who have come to hate FB still consider the absolute killer feature. Nothing on the spectrum between sending out group emails and using a dedicated events management site that people have to sign up to or at least remember to check can possibly compete with the convenience of setting up an event on FB and allowing people to RSVP with one click and see who else is planning to go and communicate with fellow attendees.

The other thing that I think allowed FB to enter its log phase growth was that it was almost spam-free. The walled-garden effect meant you could set things up to only get messages from people you'd actually chosen to communicate with. So pretty much everything in your FB inbox was wanted, useful messages. Not Nigerian scams and penis enlargement spam, which yes, can be dealt with by decent filters, but not everybody knows how to set up decent filters. And perhaps equally importantly, not promo emails from every company you bought products from once, not mailing lists you signed up to because one message in 50 is actually useful to you, not pointless messages inappropriately cc'd or reply-all'd to the whole organization. Nowadays I consider FB to be pretty spammy, but the fact is it's still pretty secure against bulk-messaging, the only way to spam FB is to convince human beings to spam their friends. So (even though humans are pretty gullible) it's still better than just about any blog or pre-FB social network or less than aggressively filtered email. This means that FB, certainly back in the day, gave people plenty of opportunities for the reward, the hit, of wanted messages with very little of the negative reinforcement that comes from information overload.

Then Zuckerberg and co realized they were sitting on an expletive gold-mine. You had this mass influx of people, many of them very little internet-savvy, all in one place, sharing their real-world identities and details, ripe for the plucking. FB needed to move on beyond simply displaying lots of adverts to serious monetization. I think that's the moment FB "turned evil", though it was certainly never benevolent. The introduction of apps, to encourage people to actually spend time on the site rather than just checking it occasionally, was the start of the rot. For a while, FB was making most of its frightening amounts of moolah from Farmville and similar addictive without actually being fun social games. The security also got a whole lot worse, because anybody could write an app which had access to a massive amount of personal information about the people who chose to use it.

The social gaming thing is still around, but it's no longer the big thing about FB. Nowadays the big thing is companies having their own pages and using FB to get advertising directly into people's trust networks. FB's customers are no longer the advertisers in the sense of the people who pay them to put "lose belly fat now!" ads on frequently visited pages, those are bottom-feeders that I imagine contribute negligible amounts to FB's revenue. FB's customers are major companies who can buy both valuable demographic information and even more importantly, direct access to customers' emotional hooks. Hence the whole awful parasitic ecosystem of click-jacking, like-stealing, the works.

So why are people still using FB when it's become this much of a cesspit? Partly because of lock-in and the network effect, and after all the event organizing thing has outlasted all the various incarnations of the site. But also I think because FB has become almost a job, rather than a leisure activity. You have to (not literally have to, but there are strong pressures) be on FB because it looks suspicious if you're not, and besides there are lots of bits of economic life you can't participate in, like when you can only book a place at an event via the organizers' FB page. And you have to carefully manage your reputation and what information can be found about you and what image you want to promote to, say, potential employers. I said I was just going to talk off-the-cuff and not look stuff up, but I have a couple of links that have been in my posting queue for a while that fit quite well here:

Rob Horning's Data self piece, which is rather technical and academic-y, but I think makes a really useful point, and is worth it for the marvellous pull-quote: “Becoming oneself” has turned into a crappy job — a compulsory low-paying, low-skill job.

Erin Boesel's Your feels as free labour is magisterial, really collecting together all the most useful recent writing on the users-as-product hamster wheel.

She also wins my heart because she's a (former?) LJ user and has lots of asides about why LJ is just so obviously superior to FB. But it doesn't help, because in spite of the marketing, FB isn't a social network any more, in any meaningful sense. FB is a constant arms race to keep your own personal brand buoyant while all kinds of companies are employing experts whose entire full-time job is to persuade or trick you to provide free advertising and information gathering for them.

Eastercon this year really made me understand emotionally that LJ as a community-forming tool is dead. First of all it's the fact that Eastercon isn't even using an LJ community for pre-con chatter any more, it has a bland little Wordpress blog. And then when I went to the con I put Liv on my badge and everybody was confused as to why on earth I'd have such a quaint thing as a handle. And I met a bunch of interesting new people, but can I maintain connections to them after the con's over? Can I heck, people are not exactly going to give out something as personal as a wallet name / Facebook name to a chance acquaintance who happened to be in a late night discussion with them at a con, but they don't have (active) LJ presences any more, so they can't give me access to a pseudonymous yet personal aspect of their life. I think some people were kind-of using Twitter for this sort of thing, but I've never really got the hang of using Twitter as a way to get to know new people without being intrusive. And most of the pro authors have blogs, but a lot of them are more about publicity than interacting with people, and there's little or no fan community anyway.

I don't think it's the case that people have left LJ to go to FB. It's that people have left LJ and people have gone to FB, more or less independently. People have left LJ partly because everything online is fragmented now, whereas it used to be all in one place, so you had a mix of essays, personal diary stuff, artworks and photography, fannish activity, memes and sharing funny pictures, ephemeral one-liners, links to interesting content etc, and now all those things have their own specialist sites. People have also left partly because the interaction barriers are just that bit too high. Hand-coding HTML was cutting edge in 2000, but now people can't be bothered when most other places on the internet make multimedia posts and comments as easy as simply typing into a box or selecting items from a GUI. That's also partly exacerbated by the fact that people are increasingly accessing the internet from phones rather than desktop computers; that pushes it much more towards a read-only or read-and-click-like, read-and-share, rather than read and respond with a thoughtful comment or your own spin-off post.

So how does Tumblr fit in? I fully admit that I am too old and boring for Tumblr. I've been sitting on the edge observing it for years now, and I still don't really get it. I have a Tumblr, and you're very welcome to follow it if you want to see my random pretty or cool things. But I don't really fundamentally understand what Tumblr is for or how it works.

Of course, this is exactly the place where I write long speculations about things I don't really understand. My theory of Tumblr is that it's precisely the anti-Facebook. It's completely and properly anonymous, it doesn't even have the danger increasingly present on pseudonymous sites including LJ clones that you can easily identify people by analysing their networks and patching together personal information from their indiscreet friends. Because you can't really tell who someone's friends are on Tumblr, or not automatically anyway. And there's almost no advertising (indeed, I am substantially worried about what on earth Tumblr's business / revenue model is supposed to be; surely Tumblr Radar can't be enough to make megabucks?) And there's very little danger (or at least very little perceived danger) that people are going to get screened out or fired or otherwise get into real world trouble for what they put on Tumblr. There's a culture where all kinds of grey-legal things are acceptable and indeed expected, from various kinds of exotic porn to making gifsets of clips from extremely valuable commercial properties such as the Game of Thrones series.

The other thing about Tumblr is that it's much more about curating than creating original content. Pretty much every Tumblr I've ever seen has a majority of reblogs from other Tumblrs, far outweighing content actually created by the Tumblr author. Some of it is, like mine, a random stream of everything-that-catches-my-eye, and some of it is literally curated, gathering together stuff with a distinct theme. And it certainly does fit in to the not quite passive, but very low effort, read-like-share model of using the internet. But that can't be the whole reason why Tumblr is successful; after all, SixApart, the company that bought LJ from its original owners and later sold it to SUP, tried to make a site where it was extremely easy to share multimedia content, and it was a complete flop (in fact, you probably don't remember Vox unless you're as much of a giant social media nerd as I am!)

Some people do use Tumblr for writing thoughtful, blog-style essays, and apparently get some benefit from the fact that there are no comments and the only way people can respond to your stuff is by reblogging and adding their own commentary. I don't comprehend how that works, but it certainly exists. It may be because the negativity generated by the entire internet falling on your head when you post something controversial is far greater, for some people, than the positivity of getting lots of comments and feedback.

I can sort of see how that works for certain types of media fandom. It used to be a truism that fanwork creation was really driven by feedback, but perhaps that's not actually true. Perhaps getting your stuff liked or shared is enough of a reward that people don't need comments. I can imagine there's a sort of freedom in knowing that your stuff is unlikely to be criticized if it doesn't work or offends someone. Plus the free playground of a subculture that apparently hasn't heard of copyright must be great for fans!

I don't see Tumblr as an alternative to LJ/DW, though. Or only in the sense that people have limited time for online activities, and time that's being used for Tumblr is probably taking away from time that might otherwise be used for DW. For me, the main features of DW are comment discussions, which Tumblr lacks, and the ability to get to know people two hops away from me or who have something in common but aren't otherwise connected, which Tumblr is pretty poor at.

Is there anything DW can do to get these people back? One thing that would help would be having a usable mobile app, and another would be replacing the sack-of-crap RTE with a modern point-and-click system for posting, including pictures and embedded media without having to hand-code your own HTML. But I suspect that even if those features ever get further than a half-hearted spec, it may not be enough or too late to deal with fragmentation. Trying to be a rival to FB and Tumblr is a mug's game, that much is sure. The only hope I have for getting people back is for DW to be a place people go as well as Facebook and Tumblr (and Twitter, Pinboard, Instragram and any number of other sites that wouldn't be on topic for this post). However, to end on a positive note, these days DW is far more active and lively with ongoing conversations than LJ, and in lots of ways I like that it's small, I like that it still has the ethos of what denise calls a "Mom and Pop business". And, y'know, I've been here 4 years and I'm still very content with my online home; four years in to my time on LJ I was already casting around for some less evil / annoying alternative.

Comments

[liv]

I'm sorry it's taken me a while to come back to this discussion. But that's a really useful observation about the long-term effects of Tumblr's reblogging culture. And yes, I bet you're right that there will be Tumblr ghosts, people only think they're fully anonymous because they use handles and the demographic skews young. And just because archiving isn't very good, all that means is that the most inconvenient or embarrassing thing will be the one that just chances to get preserved forever.