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MySpace now a “digital ghetto”
- wayt 17y agoI'm old enough to remember white flight. To make an analogy with MySpace migration to Facebook is absurd.
- diN0bot 17y agoi agree that the "white flight" analogy is a bit much. that reminds me, there are some good comments here: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/06/30/pdf_talk_the_no.html http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/06/30/pdf_tal...
- calambrac 17y agoWhy? The only difference was that white flight had a quantifiable cost barrier preventing minorities from leaving decaying inner cities as well. She's saying that this is disturbing because it's still happening, even without that financial barrier.
- enjo 17y agoWhat if I reject the premise? I've yet to see a compelling argument as to why this type of self-selection is truly harmful. Why is it a problem if folks of similar culture choose to utilize the same tools? This idea that we should all live in close exposure to diverse opinion is nice, but goes against my basic instinct. I don't want to spend my time defending my cultural choices to folks who disagree. I don't need my life to look like an internet message board.
- calambrac 17y agoThe fact that you think close proximity to another culture involves spending all your time defending yourself proves the point to me...
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- dan_the_welder 17y agoYeah me too. About 5 years ago I moved from the warehouse district into an urban neighborhood, shortly after many of my bike punk friends followed. I called us white blight.
- sharpn 17y agoUtter nonsense. Overlaying a racist agenda onto the shift from Myspace to Facebook is ridiculous. Neither have any barier to entry. Abandoning Yahoo! for Google might also shadow the population changes the author alludes to, but does that make google users racist? No. EDIT: the new original link provides more reasoned context - but even then, the data appears very, very weak [~4 anecdotal data points, all 17-year-olds]. If the point were valid it would be troubling, but I'm not convinced on the evidence provided.
- diN0bot 17y agoi think you misunderstand homophilia. ok, voted down, maybe for not explaining. alli can bring myself to do is say: the point is not barrier to entry but self-segregation. starting a comment with "Utter nonsense. <article thesis> is rediculous" is entertaining but poor form (in my books). i think there are real issues here that are being belittled simply because sociology and media studies do not fall into the IT/web realm you are comfortable with. i regret having risen to the bait to begin with. this article, ironcially, cannot be seriously considered in this community.
- teej 17y agoWe're not all tech people here on HN. Could you expand on why you think homophillia is the presiding effect for the migration to Facebook?
- pygy 17y agoI think that you actually have a point. It's not so much about racial than about social class divide. The fact that there's a correlation between class and race in the US and in Europe is a leftover of our recent history. Facebook is cleaner, more orderly. Myspace is more chaotic and flashy. It's not surprising that people will cling online to sites with some familiarity to their real life environment.
- look_lookatme 17y ago"i think you misunderstand homophilia." I'm pretty sure that doesn't make any sense in this context. Did you mean something else? [edit] I see where you were coming from in the OP: "homophily".
- diN0bot 17y agooriginal paper is here: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/PDF2009.html http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/PDF2009.html
- zach 17y agoFTFY: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/31/106-facebook/ http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/31/106-facebook/
- aberman 17y agoIs the article attributing a racist agenda? Or is it talking about an empirical reality. If the average facebook user is indeed more educated than the average myspace user, it's certainly worth talking about. Even if it is not the case, it certainly seems to be the general perception--as a friend of mine recently said: "myspace if for pedophiles and dropouts, facebook is for everybody else."
- CaptainMorgan 17y agoI'm with the initial commenter's: this is crap. What I find ironic and laughable at the same time is the article doesn't mention usability of the software deployed by the two sites and how that might actually factor in. Assuming it has a racial connotation is absurd. IMO, Facebook has a better interface, making it easier on the eyes, makes use of less ads, etc. etc. -- any part of that racial? I'd like to answer by using more derogatory words in this space because the assumption by this author is simply ignorant, but then I'd be lowering myself to this author's level.
- crux_ 17y agoYou should read the original, not the craptastic blog summary. It does indeed mention the usability differences between the two sites, then goes on to discuss how the prime deciding factor between a teenager using one site or the other is rather: "Simply put, they go where their friends are." Further it's not ascribing racist motivations to anyone's choice of social network, instead making the observation that, by going where their friends are, existing socio-economic divides are being perpetuated into social networks.
- shaunxcode 17y agoOR it's just the new geocities. This article doesn't even provide numbers - just hunches and hearsay. What a crock.
- strlen 17y agoThat's an argument that's in a way true, but it's also a non-sequitir comparison: in order to live in a middle class suburb (or especially a middle/upper class section of an urban area, e.g. Pacific Heights in San Francisco) there's a very high monetary barrier to entry. There's no monetary barrier to entry for Facebook (especially since it's no longer just for college students-- which may have been the seedling of the current phenomenon).
- calambrac 17y agoWhich is why it's that much more disturbing that the separation is taking place anyways.
- Kadin 17y agoIs it really surprising, though? I can think of lots of situations where people self-segregate along economic or cultural lines, without much in the way of external pressure to do so. I'd imagine it has a lot to do with viewing oneself as part of a group, and wanting to spend time with people whose interests and background are similar, have similar values, etc. I'd think this is something that academics have studied already; it shouldn't come as a great surprise that when people are released into some new environment they gravitate towards others similar to themselves.
- motoko 17y agoFacebook once required an .edu email address, starting from #1 ranked Harvard, opening access gradually down university rankings until it was free for all people. It's true that anyone can open a Facebook account now, but would be impossible to open a Facebook account with several years of accumulated use if you didn't attend these selected universities.
- tpowell 17y agoI graduated HS in '02, and everyone that went to college (.edu email address) was eventually on Facebook, everyone else was on MySpace. That (huge) demographic difference coupled with the poor and unpredictable interface for MySpace signaled their fate a long time ago in my opinion. This paper from a couple of years ago tackles the issue of class division between the two: http://bit.ly/classdivisions http://bit.ly/classdivisions
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- dtf 17y agoI've always suspected Facebook was run by fascist white supremacists. How come you're not allowed to change your background colour from the prescribed white?! Seriously though, nobody leaves a social networking site because "it's overcrowded with blacks". You wouldn't even leave such a site if it was overcrowded with trolls and racists. It's not a forum or some shared community resource - you only ever interact with your friends, and there's no such thing as overcrowding (as long as the servers keep up). The fail is strong in this report.
- ubernostrum 17y ago"Seriously though, nobody leaves a social networking site because "it's overcrowded with blacks". You wouldn't even leave such a site if it was overcrowded with trolls and racists. It's not a forum or some shared community resource - you only ever interact with your friends, and there's no such thing as overcrowding (as long as the servers keep up). The fail is strong in this report." Sigh. How do allegedly well-educated, intelligent, open-minded people end up jumping to conclusions like this? Read the original talk and the history of the research behind it. There are racial and class-based divides on social-networking sites, but the implication is not that anyone's (necessarily) a racist or a fascist or whatever convenient strawman you'd like to set up instead of actually using your brain. I'm honestly not sure there is an implication, aside from pointing out the obvious fact that access to the Internet is not a panacea for existing social divisions. People online seek out and interact with people like themselves, just like people offline.
- dtf 17y ago"Sigh. How do allegedly well-educated, intelligent, open-minded people end up jumping to conclusions like this?" Who's alleging anything about being well-educated, intelligent or open-minded? Keep your prejudices at the door, thank you. Seriously though, Boyd suggests "a modern incarnation of white flight". An incendiary accusation! What is "white flight" if not racism? "Oh no, don't get me wrong, I'm not a racist. I just want my kids to grow up in a neighbourhood with people of their own colour." Is she deliberately using that term to court controversy?
- 17y ago
- abossy 17y agoIsn't the reason behind this obvious? Facebook started out by targeting the Ivy League. Who is more likely to be upper-class and white than those whose social roots are at Harvard University? The restricted registration of Facebook, coupled with the importance of the network effect (making the site valuable only if you are already friends with educated Ivy League students) clearly dictates the direction of the site's demography as it grows.
- jgilliam 17y agoMySpace started in Los Angeles, and its first users were mostly from the local club scene. Very big difference from the Ivy League.
- demosthenes 17y agoasmallworld.net was started by a Swedish aristocrat, and retains a largely upper-class feel to this day. How networks start out matters.
- chaostheory 17y agoThere may be some basis for the racial argument, but in my opinion a lot of people weren't interested in MySpace because it used to be just a fancy online scrapbook. Before I joined Facebook, I had the wrong impression that it would be the same thing. Fortunately I was happy to find that Facebook wasn't a scrapbook, but instead some tool that lets you know the exact stuff people are doing, feeling, and thinking everyday by the hour. To me this was the main reason for the migration.
- paul9290 17y agoSome of this maybe true... I say this because in a marketing sense when you look the marketing cycle - innovators, early adopters, late adopters, early majority, late majority and early and late laggards you would see with new tech products that those who are economically challenged do not fall (they are not the majority) into the first two or three stages. It's more economic and educational status is the factor over race. Also has anyone ever did a race poll here at Hacker News? I went to TechCrunch event and 95% of those in attendance were white dudes, while rest of percentage split between women and minorities. I'm not trying to inflame anything here but there is a huge disparity of the minorities this article speaks of in Silicon Valley.
- jhickner 17y agoWhy do we pretend that it's some sort of virtue to be unconcerned with those we surround ourselves with? It's no virtue. After all, why are we here on HN instead of Digg or Reddit? I'm sure a demographic analysis of that switchover would yield similar results.
- kragen 17y agoWell, because class stratification denies opportunities to people who are born to the wrong parents, drastically reducing the pool of innate talent that can actually be applied to solving society's problems, maybe. Or because lack of interchange between social groups brings those groups to misunderstand and fear one another, leading to violence between them (Japanese internment camps being an example inside the US in living memory). Or because groupthink results in intellectual stagnation and collective delusions. It's true that there are a disproportionate number of upper-class twits on HN, while the twits on Reddit are mostly lower-class. But I don't hang out here because of the upper-class twits. I hang out here because it's a little less vulnerable to, among other things, delusional groupthink than Digg or Reddit.
- Tichy 17y ago"debies opportunities" - seriously? I think everybody can sign up on MySpace or Facebook. Though I suppose as a researcher you could have some fun by creating fake accounts with different profile pictures and start adding friends randomly.
- Tichy 17y agodebies = denies
- kragen 17y agoFirst, Upper-Class Chad uses MySpace. Later, he switches to Facebook, but he doesn't delete his account. His acquaintance Lower-Class Rodney is his friend on MySpace. Rodney worked as a line manager for a construction firm until getting laid off a few months ago. Rodney still only uses MySpace, because Chad didn't post on MySpace about Facebook. Chad links to all his upper-class friends on Facebook; many had never joined MySpace in the first place. If Rodney were on Facebook, he would occasionally interact with them, but he doesn't. He also doesn't see when Chad updates his Facebook status to say that his dad's company is looking for experienced line managers in their bill-collection firm. That's the sense in which social stratification denies opportunities, whether it's manifested through YASNSs or other means.
- petercooper 17y agoWhen Facebook first started becoming really popular (as in, internationally) I was very pro-Myspace exactly because of its "ghetto"-ness (not in the racial sense, but in terms of atmosphere). Facebook was dull and sterile, whereas MySpace had music, you could look at profiles of people who hadn't friended you, you could put crazy layouts on your profile, and.. well.. MySpace was just 101x more interesting. Thing is, it's still true. Facebook is dull and sterile, MySpace is still fertile and full of musicians.. and yet now I'm on Facebook and never use MySpace. Go figure!
- philwelch 17y agoEveryone thinks it's cool to live in a neighborhood where your neighbors blast hip-hop all hours of day and night until they have to sleep. Everyone thinks MySpace is cool until your browser crashes or slows down, or you strain your eyes reading yellow on orange, or you hear the first 3 seconds of some crappy hip hop song that clashes with what you already have playing on iTunes. Sadly, Facebook isn't dull and sterile anymore. I can't spend a minute there without someone asking me to join their mafia or pushing some dumb "which care bear are you" quiz on me when I just want to chill out and exchange messages with my friends and comment on my fruit smoothie this morning.
- termie 17y agoI hear the argument about browsers blowing up on MySpace all over the interwebs, but it really depends on the company you keep, to some degree. In other words, they give people freedom and some pages are horrendous, but some people's profiles are interesting and really well designed.
- Tichy 17y ago" Everyone thinks MySpace is cool until your browser crashes or slows down, or you strain your eyes reading yellow on orange, or you hear the first 3 seconds of some crappy hip hop song that clashes with what you already have playing on iTunes." So you are saying that black MySpace users tend to have a bad taste in colors and music, and therefore the white users leave? Whereas surely white users only create tasteful profiles? Or maybe MySpace in general sucks, and therefore people are leaving irrespective of race. One thing though: MySpace seems to be the standard site for music and bands, so perhaps "races" who are more preoccupied with music would tend to hang out there more.
- prodigal_erik 17y agoFrom the notes of the talk which others have cited: "If you don't know people who are different than you, you don't trust them. Think about this in the context of the politics around gay rights. The #1 predictor for how someone will side in issues of gay rights is whether or not they know someone who is gay." Even if causality works in that direction, and you could eventually make bigots into better people by hanging around with them, who would want to spend their time that way? We spend time with people we like and respect. If you regard that as a problem, what's the solution?
- swolchok 17y agofrom original article: > The #1 predictor for how someone will side in issues of gay rights is whether or not they know someone who is gay. Why couldn't one conclude that the #1 predictor for whether or not someone will meet someone who is gay is how they side in issues of gay rights?
- pj 17y agoPeople meet each other before their thoughts on gay rights, or really any thoughts are known. I would say physical location would be more of an indicator of whether or not you'll meet someone gay. If you go to the Castro for example, it's much more likely you'll meet someone gay than if you are ... well, I dunno, somewhere there aren't a lot of gay people.
- Tichy 17y ago"If you go to the Castro for example, it's much more likely you'll meet someone gay" No idea what "the Castro" is, but it sounds as if somebody who doesn't like gay people would be less likely to go there.
- Tichy 17y agoSomehow I never get to read real numbers from Dana Boyd. The only number is "... who has spent so and so many years of studying kids on social networks". I think she hit on one thesis that makes for good "linkbaity" newspaper articles and now she is milking it. In other words, it is marketing, not research.
- calambrac 17y agoThe paper is a transcription of a talk. Email her, and I'm sure she'd be happy to send you numbers.
- Tichy 17y agoSince I am not researching the subject, I really don't want to bother her. But since that thesis has been around for quite a while now, surely she has published some papers somewhere? It is just that I remember the original "article", which was just a blog entry (was it mnths ago, or years already?). But the press loved it and eventually what just was some musings in a blog became "scientific research" in the media - that is what I mean by linkbaity, it is just the kind of think newspapers love to write about. That is not Boyd's fault of course - it's just that after all that time, I would have expected to really see the blog article be turned into something more solid. If she can make a living that way, also I don't have anything against it. I just felt it lacked substance for Hacker News. Edit: these are her papers http://www.danah.org/papers/ http://www.danah.org/papers/ - I tried one that sounded like it might contain numbers, but I didn't find many. Some words on methodology, though (for Friendster, but still). Anyway, her kind of research just is not my taste (too much talking).