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I'm inclined to think the same way, that there is some kind of natural / emergent property of networks that acts as a counterbalance. Trouble is, how do we know

• jonnathanson 15y ago
  It's less an emergent or mystical property of networks, and more a function of human psychology. The decision to keep using Facebook, or to abandon Facebook for alternatives, depends on each user's calculation of Upside vs. Downside. As soon as alternatives emerge that offer equal or greater upside with less downside, users leave for those alternatives. The one thing keeping Facebook alive and well right now is that no alternatives yet exist whose upside outweighs the hassle of losing all of one's Facebook friends, data, etc. (In economic terms, this is known as a very high switching cost). Sooner or later, though, it's possible that a) more alternatives will emerge; b) some of these alternatives will be massively more attractive than FB for one reason or another; or c) FB will become increasingly annoying via feature creep, privacy concerns, homogenization of experience due to lowest common denominators among users. I'm banking on "c." There are, and will be, viable competitors to Facebook. But these competitors won't get a lot of attention, relatively speaking, until Facebook becomes more annoying than it is convenient.