(no subject)

[ewx]

I had a persistent Matty Groves earworm on the way to work. There are worse possibilities, and it reminded me of this poll.

It’s funny how social networks (as they’re now called) come and never quite go, isn’t it? Usenet hasn’t died as such but as a discussion medium it’s hugely declined: cam.ac.uk measurements of their (text-only) feed peaked at 20GB/month in 1999 and fell to about 6GB/month in 2009 when they gave up. My own measurements only start a while after that and cover a smaller set of groups (I think - I don’t know exactly what cam.ac.uk were carrying) but also show decline from 70Mbyte/day (about 2GB/month) to about half that a couple of years later.

(Binaries groups are still going strong, as far as I know; but they are a bulk copyright violation medium, not a discussion medium; they just happen to share some infrastructure.)

Similarly Livejournal seems to be much quieter than it used to be (although they seem to have stopped collecting posts-per-day stats in 2003, so it’s harder to quantify this).

In the case of Usenet’s decline there’s a lot of argument about its visibility (i.e. it’s not web-based), its limited feature set and its surly user base. Some of the claims are more convincing than others; for instance Google Groups may be a bit rubbish but it does provide Usenet access to anyone with a web browser.

It’s harder to identify anything about Livejournal that could explain its apparent decline. (I count Dreamwidth as part of Livejournal for these purposes; while it’s doubtless drawn some traffic from it, it’s not enough to make up for the decline.) People seem to have just drifted away to the (now more widely known) alternatives.

And what lot there are. As well as here and Usenet, I’m on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Flickr and Tumblr (twice), and that’s only counting the ones that I look at more than once a year (identi.ca, I’m (not) looking at you.)

I’m currently finding it unreasonably time-consuming to keep up, and I think this is likely to be an important factor in the decline of the older systems; most people are simply not very willing to try to keep up with half a dozen of these things (even if each is relatively low-traffic in its own right), and therefore pick just one or two.

Other thoughts:

• Some people crosspost their Twitter into Facebook (etc). This doesn’t really help with the keeping up - indeed if anything the duplication can make it marginally worse, since there’s sometimes a parallel set of comments to read. (Or to ignore…)
• Amusingly, “tumblr” is now as popular a Google search term as “blog”.
• Google+ wins the prize for most opaque profile URL. I guess the idea is for every individual for the next few generations to be able to have billions of distinct identities?

Comments

[kake]

It was spam that drove me away from Usenet.