@mousey so yeah, when it comes to social media my emphatic take is that it is entirely irrational, entirely chaotic, and all anybody can do is at most nudge it one direction or another, and most of the time that won’t be successful.

It really comes down to chance. Any platform can roll the dice to see if they manage to get the sustainable ignition, the critical mass at just the right time to keep users engaging with each other and coming back.

You can load the dice, but there’s no way to channel the users the way they need to be channeled into a platform.

My favorite example of this is how Facebook really sucks. It is never been anything approaching cutting edge or even interesting, and everything I’ve ever heard about Facebook management presenting at conferences echoes that they really don’t have anything new to offer.

They were just in the right place at the right time to succeed over other projects that were just as good or better.

So that’s my take on social media development. It’s almost entirely chance. It is chaos by the academic definition of chaos.

@codinghorror @jwz