The Life And Death Of Social Networks In One Chart

[FarCenter]

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-28/life-and-death-social-networks-one-chart

[kurtcagle]

1. Fantastic Graph

Many years ago I identified the six stages of social media, with the observation that most social media had a lifespan of about a decade. Facebook and Twitter are both mid Stage 5 social media companies - their biggest growth is behind them, they have become mired in scandal as attempts to monetize the service come in conflict with the very factors that initially fueled their growth, and bots are increasing relative to live users. Stage 6 social media companies have reached a stage where bots exceed human users, and the costs involved in keeping the service going exceed profits. End state for Stage 6 SM usually involves being sold off for pennies on the dollar compared to their value at the service's peak. After thirty years of watching social media companies come and go, I've yet to see one that significantly breaks this cycle.

[FarCenter]

5. Twitter seems to be an anomaly, perhaps sustained by Trumpian publicity

If the MSM stopped publicizing Trump's tweets, Twitter would also decline into obscurity.

[Skittles]

21. disconcerting how many people were sucked into the Facebook borg

sickening, really

[ProfessorGAC]

23. Seems To Be An Awful Lot of People. . .

. . .in our age group Skittles. My wife's friends all are astounded that we don't do FB. I have a page, but only because it was the only way i could tell my sister our dog had died. That was over 6 years ago and i've never gone back to it.

But, seems like nearly everyone we know, except for a couple friends who are willful luddites, has a facebook page.

Maybe it's dying because few younger participants?

[dae]

2. Great graph, thanks for posting.

[Girard442]

3. Amazing. I had no idea FB was so far off it's peak.

I had noticed an awful lot of people with no posts since 2014-2015.

[blogslut]

4. I still miss ICQ

Oh well.

[FarCenter]

8. Or Usenet, CompuServe, Prodigy and GEnie?

The good thing is that with cloud computing social networks can come and go without changing out any actual data centers.

[Horse with no Name]

14. Lol me too!n/t

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

6. I need to post this on Friendster so everyone can see!! nt

[A HERETIC I AM]

7. What?....no AOL chatrooms?

The shame!

[aikoaiko]

9. Could someone explain the Y-axis to me?

[gristy]

20. I could use some help too.

The Y axis has no label and makes no sense. The whole graph is suspect.

[FarCenter]

10. The Y-axis is the search interest in Google trends, as a percent of the global highest recorded.

The Y-axis is the search interest in Google trends, as a percent of the global highest recorded search interest.

It never reaches 100% since the plot is a 6 months moving average.

[hatrack]

11. What's the farthest-left entry on the Y-axis? Got cut off . . .

[W_HAMILTON]

13. Oh, you beautiful soul...

It didn't get cut off -- it's ICQ! It was like an AOL messenger type thing. Bless your soul for being either too young or too old to recognize it

[hatrack]

15. Oh, I'm old enough to remember Netscape Navigator, but never bumped into ICQ . . .

[sl8]

12. Source:

That blog says the source is Reddit, although the link given only goes to the image file.

I think this post is the original source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/87q8pn/the_life_and_death_of_social_networks_google/dwer548/

hnerixh OC: 1 • 18h
The graph show search interest on Google, based on data from Google Trends.

The shown plots are based on a moving average of 6 months to reduce noise. Everything is created in Wolfram Mathematica, based on .csv files exported from trends.google.com. Full source code attached, even though my code looks horrible.

EDIT: Tried to fit Classmates.com as well as Digg and Instagram, but it got too crowded to be legible.

EDIT 2: 100% is the maximum search interest for that particular network, that is, relationships between networks not to scale

More at link

[HopeAgain]

28. Search interest doesnt seem reliable as an indicator of use

Once it is in everyones favorites, why would they google it?

[Yavin4]

16. Social media networks remind me of nightclubs in the 70s and 80s

They run hot for a while. Get a ton of publicity. There are huge lines to get in. But then, they start to fade.

[blake2012]

17. Sorry but this is not meaningfully showing growth and death of social networks

At the very least they should try to show relative reach
Of the networks. Facebook and Twitter have way more users than Reddit

[FarCenter]

22. It is intended to show the shape of their growing popularity and decline with time

So the curves are all normalized to peak popularity, regardless of their absolute reach.


"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." -- Yogi Berra

Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/yogi_berra_100418

[dalton99a]

18. Kick

[ConnorMarc]

19. Remember mIRC?

Those were the days...

*sigh*

[Ezior]

26. IRC is still alive, at least last time I checked, in the open source software community

though developers are probably moving to other means of communication for some use cases. I've seen a simple web-based chat that allows signing in using github credentials, and I guess developer-centric web-based tools make IRC less and less relevant.

Not sure about mIRC, open source people probably use irssi, XChat etc.

[melm00se]

24. This graph

is probably usable for any social/pop phenomena.

Interesting thing A rises and falls in popularity in a reciprocal function as Interesting thing B rises and falls.

[Renew Deal]

25. No Friendster?

I’d be interested to see LinkedIn on there

[HopeAgain]

27. Percent of what?

Teens with smartphones? I don't understand what we are looking at...