Reading an interesting post by Trent Reznor regarding his departure from social media (in particular Twitter, but also his extensive participation in online fora w/ fans). He charts his progress from idealist (hoping that he could make the relationship between artist and fan more intimate and unmediated, no PR people, etc) to cynic. His major problems with social media are trolls and anonymity. Essentially, its the classic problem of anonymity leading to more purposefully disruptive hate speech. Reznor offer a little dimestore psychology based on his discovery of who was behind the trolling. It is more or less consistent with the findings of Mattathias Schwartz in his NYTimes article on trolling: people who troll are looking for a way to get back at the world for hurting them, marginalizing them, or rendering them powerless, and anonymous internet fora provide them with the easiest way to do this.
Reznor's relationship with fans is unlike most social media users' experiences. There's a significant real-world power imbalance between star and fan, one that attracts trolling. Trolling doesn't happen everywhere or in random places; usually, its only highly-trafficked places or in communities that someone has something against. Reznor notes how moderators can use filters to reduce the effects of trolls (and places like Digg and Youtube do good jobs of getting rid of spam and trolls by using collective downvoting to obscure them and render them ineffective) but its still trouble to do this and if the benefits don't outweigh the trouble, then you stop doing it.
Social media as a whole seems sustainable to me. People really want the ability to connect with others who share some of the same values, preference, or beliefs, some who may not be available in the real-world social networks they inhabit. But individual online social networks or applications like Twitter and various message boards seem precarious. Some of their appeal might be in their novelty. Another problem might be the "tipping point" effect when several key members decide to leave or have some real-world commitment that draws them away. As with a real-life party, if a couple of key people leave, that tends to clear everyone else out, even if those people wouldn't have planned on leaving that soon in the first place. Its just group-think and there are no negative repercussions for bailing on an online social scene.
Its possible that online social scenes develop at a point when its members have some down-time, in transition periods in their real world lives. Its not that they're "losers" and can't make it in the real world social scenes (though that might still be the case for many). Its more that they have an appetite for sociability that is underserved at the time they join the social scene. So really, members have two things in common: whatever the raison d'etre of the scene is and the fact that they're all in some sort of transition period (which could include a period of identity questioning, hence popularity w/ teens). Anyway, these scenes don't last b/c the law of averages says that each person's real life will eventually interfere with their participation and the group will splinter.
But perhaps that depends on how much the group is really about the people in the group or whatever the group happens to be "about" (e.g. Nine Inch Nails, funny online videos, hunting, etc). I guess the latter are more informational exchanges or opportunities to share amusement over a subject while the former are something resembling (and perhaps standing in for) real world social scenes. Real world social scenes break up, too. People move away, get jobs, have kids, get divorced, etc. But I still suspect that b/c they are joined during times of real world social transition and there's no negative repercussions to leaving, online social scenes are more apt to disintegrate (or at least cycle through members) than real world social scenes. Really, they haven't been around long enough to say one way or the other.
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