Twitter seems to be the only newsfeed-driven network where users can easily & constantly retune their graph.
— @semil
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If you launch with a small, dedicated group of interesting people that can asymmetrically follow each other, along with a global feed of all content posted, you can feel like you are the member of an interesting and vibrant community.
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Pinterest and Instagram followed the Twitter blueprint of asymmetric follows + global feed to scale from a small critical mass of interesting people into a massive, global community.
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Anti-network effects occur when a community which has already achieved critical mass begins to lose value with each additional signup. The reason is that the core community that created the value to begin with starts to get marginalized and leaves.
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Teens embracing new services say they’d rather use aliases than their real names.
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On Twitter or Tumblr, they say, they can also be more selective about what they share and with whom, and feel less social pressure to “friend” everyone in their school or friends of friends.
Twitter, they say, just feels more private and intimate. They can use pseudonyms or private locked accounts so their tweets stay between friends.
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“Teens need a place to socialize and express themselves without grown-ups staring at them.”
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In most of the communities we’ve worked in, teens will “friend” virtually everyone they recognize from school, making Facebook less like a collection of friends and more like a town hall meeting. It’s where young people learn the latest gossip, catch up with their peers, publicly reinforce relationships, and turn acquaintances into friends.
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Mei-Xing, an 18-year-old high-school senior, leaves Facebook open while she studies late into the night because she likes seeing the names of friends pop up in chat windows. Even without talking to them, she feels less lonely knowing they are out there.
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Many Instagram biographies now include the words ‘no ghost followers.’
A ghost follower is someone who never interacts with you. That might be someone who has left Instagram. Or it may be, much like you still see on Twitter, Instagram users who follow huge numbers of other users en masse with the aim of in turn acquiring a big follower number.
Popping is Instagram speak for getting on the popular page. Doing so generally depends on having a large number of likes and comments in a very short (less than 15 mins) period of time, hence groups exist to deliberately members “pop.” In addition to having a concentrated number of likes for each post, most Instagramers believe that a smaller follower total gives you an advantage.
As a result, there is no benefit in having an artificially large follower number that is exactly that – just a number.
Though most brands now do understand the importance of a committed follower, the philosophy of the big number is still alive and well. By contrast, its interesting to see a group of core users of a social network embrace the concept of (as the IGexorcist site puts it) people over numbers.
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Because they place a high value on emotional satisfaction, older adults often spend more time with familiar individuals with whom they have had rewarding relationships. This selective narrowing of social interaction maximizes positive emotional experiences and minimizes emotional risks as individuals become older. According to this theory, older adults systematically hone their social networks so that available social partners satisfy their emotional needs.
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The fact that you’re not trying to maximize your audience creates a fundamental distribution problem for Path and any other micronetwork that pops up. How will the mainstream ever find out about Path or think it’s work their time if they’re not bombarded with invites? This may unfortunately be why micronetworks won’t succeed as standalone products, and may need to live within your general social network service of choice.
— Friend Count Up, Sharing Down: Path Only Works If You Reject Those Friend Requests
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you have to undertake the socially awkward experience of rejecting requests from your co-workers, acquaintances, and fellow early adopters, and make sure not to put them in the same position. You may have already let some loose acquaintances into your inner circle or have outstanding requests from Path 1, and will need to go in and remove them.
— Friend Count Up, Sharing Down: Path Only Works If You Reject Those Friend Requests
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Here’s how we fix it: On a designated day, everybody’s friend list is reset to zero. This goes beyond efforts like National Unfriend Day. I’m suggesting Facebook let us wipe the slate totally clean and start over. Then we can refill the coordinates of our respective social graphs only with appropriate people.
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So Facebook, I ask you … auto suggest we unfriend the 10% of our Facebook friends that we interact with the least once a year.
