Photo by Timothy Hales Bennett on Unsplash

The Diminishing Returns Of Social Media

The bigger networks get, the crappier the experience

Social networks benefit from network effects. For example, Facebook is not very useful to me unless my good friends are also on it. But for every friend that signs up for Facebook, Facebook becomes more and more useful and fun. And the increases, especially at the start, are abnormally large. Imagine the following increments:

1. You’re the only person out of your friend group on Facebook.
2. You and your best friend are both on Facebook but that’s it.
3. A few more of your friends from college join Facebook. Now instead of going to the pub once a year, you can regularly chat, catch up, and share memes via Facebook.
4. All your friends, family, etc. including some acquaintances you want to get to know are on Facebook. You can manage 99% of your social life digitally now.
5. Some random work acquaintances join Facebook.

Moving from 1 to 2 is big — it’s basically going from zero satisfaction to a good amount of satisfaction. And going from 2 to 3 (assuming you like and want to catch up with your friends) should introduce another big jump in satisfaction. After that the subsequent increases in satisfaction get smaller. The jump from 4 to 5 is probably…