I was saying the opposite: attrition form MySpace was gradual at first and also gradual later. People left MySpace because Facebook ate its lunch in part with a better user experience—because contrary to what the folks who pine for a second coming of GeoCities-style personal homepages constantly bang on about, when it comes to consumption people want legible, mostly consistent experiences instead of just giving creators free reign to control font shapes and sizes, colors, background images, background music/noises, etc. (I'm digressing now, but this unity of interface concern is basically the same reason why github.com/* pages are more desirable/sought out as an entry point to understanding what a given software project is about than stuff in the *.github.io namespace.)
Re:“Twitter is going great” is being sunset
by fullshark on Monday May 01, 2023 @11:15AM
(#35773971)
Hmm perhaps you are right. Elon acquisition of Twitter / Fox News acquisition of Myspace? not sure what was the catalyst there. Removing porn from Tumblr? All sudden shocks that lead to a long term decline and eventual irrelevance.
News Corp is not the same thing as Fox News, but aside from that, I wasn't saying there was a catalyst in the MySpace case. And it wasn't the purchase by News Corp that caused attrition, besides; MySpace saw massive growth for years with News Corp in control all the while, including its peak.
Depends. Livejournal, say, was gradual (long-term decline), then sudden (Russian takeover). Similar for freenode. Digg was sudden (truly disastrous redesign), then gradual (spiral into irrelevance). Tumblr was… kind of all over the place.
I know people love to crib Hemingway's turn of phrase, but I don't think it makes sense here. Because it's the opposite, right? Sudden first, and then gradual. There's some big catalyst, and what remains afterwards slowly dissipates seemingly interminably towards zero. Even in notable cases like MySpace, which still exists, it's just "gradual" at first and then it's still "gradual" later, too.