Mass migration from Twitter is likely to be an uphill battle – just ask ex-Tumblr users

 

The turmoil inside Twitter headquarters is sparking discussion of a mass exodus of users. What will happen if there is a rush to the exits? AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

Elon Musk announced that “the bird is freed” when his US$44 billion acquisition of Twitter officially closed on Oct. 27, 2022. Some users on the microblogging platform saw this as a reason to fly away.

Over the course of the next 48 hours, I saw countless announcements on my Twitter feed from people either leaving the platform or making preparations to leave. The hashtags #GoodbyeTwitter, #TwitterMigration and #Mastodon were trending. The decentralized, open source social network Mastodon gained over 100,000 users in just a few days, according to a user counting bot.

As an information scientist who studies online communities, this felt like the beginning of something I’ve seen before. Social media platforms tend not to last forever. Depending on your age and online habits, there’s probably some platform that you miss, even if it still exists in some form. Think of MySpace, LiveJournal, Google+ and Vine.

When social media platforms fall, sometimes the online communities that made their homes there fade away, and sometimes they pack their bags and relocate to a new home. The turmoil at Twitter is causing many of the company’s users to consider leaving the platform. Research on previous social media platform migrations shows what might lie ahead for Twitter users who fly the coop.

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has caused turmoil within the company and prompted many users to consider leaving the social media platform.

Several years ago, I led a research project with Brianna Dym, now at University of Maine, where we mapped the platform migrations of nearly 2,000 people over a period of almost two decades. The community we examined was transformative fandom, fans of literary and popular culture series and franchises who create art using those characters and settings.

We chose it because it is a large community that has thrived in a number of different online spaces. Some of the same people writing Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction on Usenet in the 1990s were writing Harry Potter fan fiction on LiveJournal in the 2000s and Star Wars fan fiction on Tumblr in the 2010s.

By asking participants about their experiences moving across these platforms – why they left, why they joined and the challenges they faced in doing so – we gained insights into factors that might drive the success and failure of platforms, as well as what negative consequences are likely to occur for a community when it relocates.

‘You go first’

Regardless of how many people ultimately decide to leave Twitter, and even how many people do so around the same time, creating a community on another platform is an uphill battle. These migrations are in large part driven by network effects, meaning that the value of a new platform depends on who else is there.

In the critical early stages of migration, people have to coordinate with each other to encourage contribution on the new platform, which is really hard to do. It essentially becomes, as one of our participants described it, a “game of chicken” where no one wants to leave until their friends leave, and no one wants to be first for fear of being left alone in a new place.

For this reason, the “death” of a platform – whether from a controversy, disliked change or competition – tends to be a slow, gradual process. One participant described Usenet’s decline as “like watching a shopping mall slowly go out of business.”

It’ll never be the same

The current push from some corners to leave Twitter reminded me a bit of Tumblr’s adult content ban in 2018, which reminded me of LiveJournal’s policy changes and new ownership in 2007. People who left LiveJournal in favor of other platforms like Tumblr described feeling unwelcome there. And though Musk did not walk into Twitter headquarters at the end of October and turn a virtual content moderation lever into the “off” position, there was an uptick in hate speech on the platform as some users felt emboldened to violate the platform’s content policies under an assumption that major policy changes were on the way.

So what might actually happen if a lot of Twitter users do decide to leave? What makes Twitter Twitter isn’t the technology, it’s the particular configuration of interactions that takes place there. And there is essentially zero chance that Twitter, as it exists now, could be reconstituted on another platform. Any migration is likely to face many of the challenges previous platform migrations have faced: content loss, fragmented communities, broken social networks and shifted community norms.

But Twitter isn’t one community, it’s a collection of many communities, each with its own norms and motivations. Some communities might be able to migrate more successfully than others. So maybe K-Pop Twitter could coordinate a move to Tumblr. I’ve seen much of Academic Twitter coordinating a move to Mastodon. Other communities might already simultaneously exist on Discord servers and subreddits, and can just let participation on Twitter fade away as fewer people pay attention to it. But as our study implies, migrations always have a cost, and even for smaller communities, some people will get lost along the way.

The ties that bind

Our research also pointed to design recommendations for supporting migration and how one platform might take advantage of attrition from another platform. Cross-posting features can be important because many people hedge their bets. They might be unwilling to completely cut ties all at once, but they might dip their toes into a new platform by sharing the same content on both.

Ways to import networks from another platform also help to maintain communities. For example, there are multiple ways to find people you follow on Twitter on Mastodon. Even simple welcome messages, guides for newcomers and easy ways to find other migrants could make a difference in helping resettlement attempts stick.

And through all of this, it’s important to remember that this is such a hard problem by design. Platforms have no incentive to help users leave. As long-time technology journalist Cory Doctorow recently wrote, this is “a hostage situation.” Social media lures people in with their friends, and then the threat of losing those social networks keeps people on the platforms.

But even if there is a price to pay for leaving a platform, communities can be incredibly resilient. Like the LiveJournal users in our study who found each other again on Tumblr, your fate is not tied to Twitter’s.

Casey Fiesler, Associate Professor of Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Why is 13 considered unlucky? Explaining the power of its bad reputation

 

Many elevators do not have a floor numbered 13 because of common superstitions about the number. Luis Alvarez/DigitalVision via Getty Images

Would you think it weird if I refused to travel on Sundays that fall on the 22nd day of the month?

How about if I lobbied the homeowner association in my high-rise condo to skip the 22nd floor, jumping from the 21st to 23rd?

It’s highly unusual to fear 22 – so, yes, it would be appropriate to see me as a bit odd. But what if, in just my country alone, more than 40 million people shared the same baseless aversion?

That’s how many Americans admit it would bother them to stay on one particular floor in high-rise hotels: the 13th.

According to the Otis Elevator Co., for every building with a floor numbered “13,” six other buildings pretend to not have one, skipping right to 14.

Many Westerners alter their behaviors on Friday the 13th. Of course bad things do sometimes happen on that date, but there’s no evidence they do so disproportionately.

As a sociologist specializing in social psychology and group processes, I’m not so interested in individual fears and obsessions. What fascinates me is when millions of people share the same misconception to the extent that it affects behavior on a broad scale. Such is the power of 13.

Origins of the superstition

The source of 13’s bad reputation – “triskaidekaphobia” – is murky and speculative. The historical explanation may be as simple as its chance juxtaposition with lucky 12. Joe Nickell investigates paranormal claims for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a nonprofit that scientifically examines controversial and extraordinary claims. He points out that 12 often represents “completeness”: the number of months in the year, gods on Olympus, signs of the zodiac and apostles of Jesus. Thirteen contrasts with this sense of goodness and perfection.

The number 13 may be associated with some famous but undesirable dinner guests. In Norse mythology, the god Loki was 13th to arrive at a feast in Valhalla, where he tricked another attendee into killing the god Baldur. In Christianity, Judas – the apostle who betrayed Jesus – was the 13th guest at the Last Supper.

‘The Last Supper,’ a 15th-century mural painting in Milan created by Leonardo da Vinci. Universal History Archive/Getty Images

But the truth is, sociocultural processes can associate bad luck with any number. When the conditions are favorable, a rumor or superstition generates its own social reality, snowballing like an urban legend as it rolls down the hill of time.

In Japan, 9 is unlucky, probably because it sounds similar to the Japanese word for “suffering.” In Italy, it’s 17. In China, 4 sounds like “death” and is more actively avoided in everyday life than 13 is in Western culture – including a willingness to pay higher fees to avoid it in cellphone numbers. And though 666 is considered lucky in China, many Christians around the world associate it with an evil beast described in the biblical Book of Revelation. There is even a word for an intense fear of 666: hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia.

Social and psychological explanations

There are many kinds of specific phobias, and people hold them for a variety of psychological reasons. They can arise from direct negative experiences – fearing bees after being stung by one, for example. Other risk factors for developing a phobia include being very young, having relatives with phobias, having a more sensitive personality and being exposed to others with phobias.

Part of 13’s reputation may be connected to a feeling of unfamiliarity, or “felt sense of anomaly,” as it is called in the psychological literature. In everyday life, 13 is less common than 12. There’s no 13th month, 13-inch ruler, or 13 o'clock. By itself a sense of unfamiliarity won’t cause a phobia, but psychological research shows that we favor what is familiar and disfavor what is not. This makes it easier to associate 13 with negative attributes.

People also may assign dark attributes to 13 for the same reason that many believe in “full moon effects.” Beliefs that the full moon influences mental health, crime rates, accidents and other human calamities have been thoroughly debunked. Still, when people are looking to confirm their beliefs, they are prone to infer connections between unrelated factors. For example, having a car accident during a full moon, or on a Friday the 13th, makes the event seem all the more memorable and significant. Once locked in, such beliefs are very hard to shake.

Then there are the potent effects of social influences. It takes a village – or Twitter – to make fears coalesce around a particular harmless number. The emergence of any superstition in a social group – fear of 13, walking under ladders, not stepping on a crack, knocking on wood, etc. – is not unlike the rise of a “meme.” Although now the term most often refers to widely shared online images, it was first introduced by biologist Richard Dawkins to help describe how an idea, innovation, fashion or other bit of information can diffuse through a population. A meme, in his definition, is similar to a piece of genetic code: It reproduces itself as it is communicated among people, with the potential to mutate into alternative versions of itself.

The 13 meme is a simple bit of information associated with bad luck. It resonates with people for reasons given above, and then spreads throughout the culture. Once acquired, this piece of pseudo-knowledge gives believers a sense of control over the evils associated with it.

False beliefs, true consequences

Groups concerned with public relations seem to feel the need to kowtow to popular superstitions. Perhaps owing to the near-tragic Apollo 13 mission, NASA stopped sequentially numbering space shuttle missions, dubbing the 13th shuttle flight STS-41-G. In Belgium, complaints from superstitious passengers led Brussels Airlines to revamp its logo in 2006. It had been a “b”-like image made of 13 dots. The airline added a 14th. Like many other airlines, its planes’ row numbering skips 13.

Because superstitious beliefs are inherently false, they are as likely to do harm as good – consider health frauds, for example. I’d like to believe influential organizations – perhaps even elevator companies – would do better to warn the public about the dangers of clinging to false beliefs than to continue legitimizing them.

Barry Markovsky, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of South Carolina

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.